Grianan Ailligh

Continuing our northerly route, we drove up to Grianan Ailligh, a ring fort perched atop a hill with commanding views of Donegal, Derry, and Tyrone counties. Built in the midst of the Iron Age, 1st century AD, it is marvelously well preserved, dry stone construction, a lintelled entrance, with walls 5 meters high and nearly as thick. Archaeologists conjecture it rests on a neolithic cairn and was at the crossroads of neolithic paths.

Perched high indeed

With commanding views

Pano

Photos by Vicki, who climbed up to the battlements

Donegal Castle

Well, it's just a tower house actually, built by Red Hugh O'Donnell in the 15th century, burned and abandoned when the Brits arrived and the O'Donnells fled, given to a Capt. Basil Brooke in the early 17th, who rebuilt it and added the Jacobean annex. It affords a good look at what a tower house was like, was free with our Irish Heritage card, and was on the way....

Jacobean annex

The garderobe--and we thought the "long drops" in Nepal were
long...

Tudor fireplace

Helpful model #10,397; back in the time of Red Hugh

In the Jacobean annex

Strandhill

During my recovery we spent a couple days/nights at a campground at Strandhill, Sligo's beach, as it were.

Still on the great road

Our pitch

The view

Strandhill is a bit of a surfing place, and several schools operate
from here 

Among Yeats' poems...Knocknarea and Maeve

Surfing school

Sand dunes

Looking the other way, more surfing students

Carrowmore Tombs

As I began to feel better, we drove over to the Carrowmore Tombs. Very briefly, the megalithic center seems to have been devoted strictly to burials--usually burials of ashes--in dolmens, often within stone circles. The main activity among the 30-40 monuments has been dated between 4,000 BC and 3,000 BC, making it significantly older than the larger and more complex center to the east, the Bru na Boinne, Newgrange and Knowth (we'll get there), and others. Some few sites at Carrowmore have been C14 dated to 5,500 BC, which would make them about as old as anything we have seen from the neolithic. The largest of the Carrowmore Tombs is C51, a cairned passage tomb, now open, but almost like a little Newgrange. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

C51, from a distance

Vicki with Knocknarea behind her in the distance

And me

C51 again

Entry to C51

C51 interior

Knocknarea

Our next goal was the Carrowmore Tombs megalithic center, near Sligo, one of Ireland's three or four largest such centers.

You have to love a place where people have stone circles and
dolmen in their front yards...although the OPW staff later
assured us that this one was indeed a folly; you have to love
a place where people do follies like this...

We got to Carrowmore too late to tour the site...although you can
probably see a dozen circles just from the parking lot

And so found a place to park under Mt. Knocknarea, the car-park
for those hiking to the summit; as it turned out, we were there
a couple days, and then a couple more days, as my lung infection
got worse, and then better, after a visit to the doctor in Sligo;
just FWIW, cost of doctor visit, 45E, cost of strong antibiotic, 7E

Knocknarea, from Carrowmore Tombs

Surmounted by Queen Maeve's cairn and tomb; Queen Maeve
is one of those Irish mythical figures presumably dating from
the Bronze or even Iron ages; the cairn atop Knocknarea has
been dated to 3,500BC, way, way older...

Knocknarea dominates the skyline from Sligo and figures in
half a dozen of Yeats' poems; we both had hoped to climb it--
only a thousand feet--when I got better, but as days passed, it
became clear my convalescence would take more time than we
had to spare; "next time"