The Cliffs of Moher and The Burrens, Ireland

In the photo below I showcased the top of the man-made stone wall.  Irish rock walls are the most interesting I have ever seen in the way they stack the rocks.  This wall was built to protect humans.  Many people have lost their lives to these cliffs, whether it was intentional or accidental.  There is even a memorial to the people who have lost their lives on Moher.

 The Cliffs of Moher and The Burren National Park are both in the UNESCO Global Geopark. This was made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2011.

You can't really take a bad picture of the cliffs.  They are stunning with the green of Ireland sticking to them.

O'Brien's Castle is a landmark that is photographed extensively.  You can enter inside and walk up the spiral staircase to the top if you wish.

There are two sections that have broken off of the cliffs over the millenniums and this is one of them.

The Cliffs of Moher overlook the Atlantic Ocean and are 702 feet tall.  This Geopark is all located in County Clare Ireland.  These cliffs continue for 14 kilometres.  There is also a 300 million-year-old river channel buried within the cliffs.  They are definitely something to see.  We lucked out and had mostly a sunny day at the cliffs which was great for photo taking and walking the narrow paths on the cliff-tops.   These cliffs are the second most visited site in all of Ireland with 1.6 million people visiting.  The Guinness Storehouse in Dublin was the top dog with 1.7 million visitors last year.

There is a Visitor's Center or Experience imparting a lot of information, with posters to read, history to learn and videos to watch.  The Experience is buried into the side of the cliff along with 5 stores, which was pretty neat.  

In the Visitor Center, you can work on a postcard to send home.  This was ours below.

This little dude (well not so little) raven is not a zoomed-in photo.  He allowed me to get right up to him because he wanted food.  Ravens are larger than crows by the way.

The Moher Flags or the flagstones that you walk on all over the park and all of the walls are slabs of rock taken from Moher and they have curious and distinctive markings within them.  They could be fossils, a seashell, or markings made by sea creatures 320 million years ago.  Ireland used to be underwater.  There is much evidence of this in the cave systems throughout Ireland as well.  Below you can see the slabs of Moher rock used along the path for the wall.  These were up to your chest in places.

The walks along the cliffs are extensive and you can walk for hours.  We walked both ways from the Visitor Center.  To one side of the paths are the ever-present Atlantic Ocean and to the other side are bucolic scenes of cattle and jade-green plots of land with quaint houses.

The Burrens are extensive with over 300 square kilometers of lunar-like landscapes.  The Burren is located in County Clare on the West coast of Ireland.  These rock formations are left over from the last glacier scraping its way over the land and leaving this soft limestone that over the millenniums has been pitted and stiped by the weather.  These deep lines in the rock are called grikes.

We did a bit of a hike but this is not easy to walk on.  Below is the entrance to one of the walks, again with the fancy Irish rock walls to pass through.

I love the large gouges in the rock hill below.

It had just sprinkled out a bit right before I took this photo which makes the rock look more fascinating to me.

Believe it or not, there are people living on the Burrens and farming where there is enough topsoil to plant a crop. 

To the left is a great shot of the Burren in the top half of the photo and the green crops lower in the photo

To the right is the strange Burren hill where the soil does not reach.

The side roads are very tight in Ireland where only one car can drive and if you meet an oncoming car you either have to back up or they do until a spot big enough is found for two cars to pass.  To illustrate how tight it is, Daren spotted a cow munching on the vines at the top of the rock wall.  I asked him to bring his window down and I took this shot.  I did not have to zoom in.