England and Ireland June 2016

England, Wales- June 3-12, 2016

Here is the link to the NG/Lindblad guest slideshow for the UK part:

Click here to see your voyage portfolio

I added the link for the Ireland part right after our visit to the Jameson Irish whiskey visit below.

This trip captured my attention because it takes us from London by water out the Thames, around the southern coast of England, to several of the Channel Islands, ashore in Wales and then around Ireland. These are all places we are unlikely to visit again, with the exception of Ireland. 

We left directly from Dulles. Every time I drive there I say to myself I will never do this again. This time we ran into traffic outside Fredericksburg causing us to detour onto Route 17 in a round about way to get to I- 66, and then on and off, hard and drizzling rain. However, we got there on time and did not face a long line at the TSA security as I had expected.

One tricky thing about this flight to London was that it left at 10 pm and landed at 10 am. So there was not really time for eating dinner on the plane and watching a couple of movies if we expected to get part of a night of sleep. Going right to sleep, or closing our eyes immediately, worked and we were able to stay awake fairly well during the next day.

Saturday June 4- London, Horseguards Hotel

After getting settled Connie and I walked about 15 minutes to Westminster Abbey. Getting used to looking the wrong way for traffic was difficult and the summer tourist crowds (talk about a mini-UN!) were in full force. I had then brought along a somewhat guided map of a walking tour from our hotel, so we backtracked to Charing Cross and went over the Hungerford Bridge to walk along the south side of the Thames for a couple of miles. On this route we passed the National Theatre, the Tate, a place where there were lots of skateboarders, lots of street performers and off beat exhibits, a good place at Gabriel's Wharf to get a crepe (a Brit we met in the crepe shop said we were the smallest Americans he had ever seen) and the Globe Theatre before we recrossed the river on the Millennium Bridge (opened in 2001 and initially wobbly to the first pedestrian traffic). That took us straight to St. Paul's where we attended Evensong and got to sit in the choir. It was a good service but I must confess I was nodding off a bit.

After the service we had to hustle back to the hotel along the embankment by the gardens of the Inns of Court to meet Bobby and Marilyn for a casual dinner and then catching up on some sleep.

Sunday, June 5, London, Orion, and the Thames estuary

Connie and I overslept. After a bit of a rush getting ready, Bobby and I walked Marilyn and Connie over to Westminster for morning services and then did a very unstructured walkabout thru St. James Park, the Mall, Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square, and back to the hotel. Then we took a crazy back and forth bus ride ( due to traffic) to get to the Orion, which was tied alongside the old battleship Belfast on the south side of the river. London opened Tower Bridge for our departure down the Thames and out to sea. Somehow I missed seeing the Thames baffles which regulate the flow up the river during storm surges.

Monday, June 6, Portsmouth

The choices for today were Nelson's ship Victory, Ike's DDay headquarters (on DDay itself!) or the Titchfield Bird Preserve. We went to the reserve and got in about a 2.5 mile hike. The land birds were hard to see but there were plenty of easily visible shorebirds including my first avocet, shelducks, black headed gulls (not laughing gulls) and moorhens. The temperature was cool and the sea breeze smelled and felt good.

Before the visit to the reserve David Barnes gave an excellent lecture on the peoples of Britain and Ireland in the context of how the islands became Christian. It really sorted out a lot of questions about invasion and diffusion. It was also more helpful than the book on the Celts which I am 40% finished but stopping for now.

After dinner, since the Victory was one of the day's choices for activities, NatGeo showed a BBC documentary on Nelson and the battle of Trafalgar. It wasn't the greatest in terms of acting but did a good job of describing Nelson's drive, his tactics, and his final battle.

Tuesday, June 7, Alderney and Sark

It is a very foggy day and thus a slow start. Connie and I went to town and took an hour long unplanned and wandering walk. This island was occupied by the Germans in WWII after the inhabitants were evacuated by the British.

(Addendum- in 2024 a German concentration camp has just been found on Alderney.)

These islands, Alderney, Sark, Jersey, Guernsey, are collectively called the Channel Islands. They are not part of the U.K. or France although right off Cherbourg. They make their living from being tax havens.

It was so foggy I can't say much else about Alderney, but one of the Nat Geo guys got a great nature photo:

This called a bumblebee orchid.

Sark was a different story- a much smaller island with no cars, only tractors and about 500 people. It was still foggy when we approached, but after landing and scaling a tall pier (tide about 15 to 20 feet) and then riding the tractor pulled "toast rack"up a long hill, it was clear and sunny at the top. Our activity was a long (maybe 7 km hike) along the paths and stone roads out to Little Sark and back to the Seigneur gardens. On the way we saw a tractor pulling a trailer with Amazon Prime Pantry goods in it.

Look closely at the contents of the trailer.

After all this hiking, we had dinner with 2 Sarkese at our table- Jan who gave a brief talk on the Channel Islands during WWII, and Sue who gave a talk after dinner about Sark as a Dark Sky Island. Both knew The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society book and both were very worried about Donald Trump, whose name means ----- in British slang.

Jan and Sue told us about their houses on the island- both have leaseholds, one until 2044 and one for 100 years. There is basically no crime on the island except for post pub fights and some sparring over the girls from the mainland who come over to drive the carriage rides in the summer.

Sark was a haven for pirates in QE I's time and then a prominent merchant petitioned the queen to acquire the island and eliminate the pirates. The lord got the island but was required to bring 40 families there and divide the island into 40 equal plots for the families. These still exist. There was no lord during WWII but the Dame was a very firm woman who handled the German occupation very well. The Dame had a grown son then who was her successor and he had a son also, her grandson. The successor was killed in an air raid on Liverpool during the war when he ignored an air raid warning and stayed in his hotel room with his mistress. The grandson, in his 80s, is still alive and according to our Sarkese friends is a regular guy.

Wednesday, June 8, Dartmouth

First stop today was Dame Agatha Christie's house, called Greenway House, which was actually her holiday house that she owned from 1938 until her death in 1976. It stayed in her family until 2009 when the family gave it to the National Trust. The house was full of things owned by the families, but it struck me as cluttered by lots of China  and knickknacks. There was a plaque saying she and her husband attempted to collect a piece of silver from each year of each king's reign from some date on. I did like seeing Agatha's books in place. The grounds were the best- great views of the river, the pleasure boats and Sir Walter Raleigh's place across the river, and then lush greenery and an indoor peach garden. Outside the front door there were several yellow cloth beach like lounge chairs and when we walked up a woman was reading a book in one of them. Easy to imagine AC's family doing the same.

I know next to nothing about AC but now know her husband was an archaeologist and that they went to Egypt and other places for digs. While was digging she must have been writing. Before marriage she was a pharmacy assistant- helpful for poison plots.

Another good thing about visiting Greenway was the ferry ride up and back- scenic all the way.

We had lunch in a fish and chips place, then a four mile hike that involved a very strenuous uphill bit, then a pub visit and back to the ship.

Thursday, June 9, Isles of Scilly- Tresco and St. Mary's

There are actually  5 of these islands that are inhabited and many more just rocks of various sizes in the sea. We anchored mid way between Tresco and St. Mary's for the day and visited the unbelievably beautiful Abbey Gardens on Tresco in the morning when it was warm and sunny and Hugh Town on St. M in the afternoon.

The gardens are 17 jam packed acres with mostly plants from the Southern Hemisphere. There are 3000 species. Usually Tresco gets about 33 inches of rain per year with no snow and because of the Gulf Stream the semi tropical and tropical plants grow to be lush. However in 1987 there was a hurricane with 127 mph winds followed by snow and very cold temperatures in 1990 that did a lot of damage. 

We walked a lot of the rest of the island after our tour and then back to the boat for lunch.

The girls did not go to St M and Bobby and I had a brief walk around town but there was nothing much to comment on. We did wander into a canvas bag shop called Ratbag (named after a local island known for rats) and I took an interesting photo of the shop and harbor.

Leesa should bring A&T to Tresco to get them away from devices for a week. Lots of biking and no cars, little ferry rides to the other islands, a castle. Sign me up too.

During the after dinner talk on seabirds we passed the smallest island in the world with a structure on it- a lighthouse in the Celtic Sea 40 feet high on a 16 foot island.

Friday, June 10, Skomer Island and Fishguard

Calm night at sea and a wet, cool, foggy morning- perfect for a zodiac ride around the island to see puffins, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, and one fulmar. We saw many of the different bird species nesting at various levels of the cliffs and rafting up in the waters.

Bobby, Marilyn, Connie and I happened to be in the zodiac with David Barnes who, as a proud Welshman,  told us about how the geologic rocks and ages are named after Welsh areas- Silurian, Cambrian, etc. He followed this up with a lecture to the whole group about Wales. We are in Welsh waters for all of today and tomorrow. The land on the peninsula we are approaching is where the pre history people got the rocks for Stonehenge. David said they actually have found the quarry in the last couple of years. But the mystery remains- how did they get the stone to Stonehenge?

Two more notes about Wales- this is where the Tudors (Wars of the Roses) come from, and there are 4x as many sheep as people.

Connie and I went up to the bridge this morning- I wanted to ask about flags. The officer on duty was Russlan, from Odessa. Connie and Russlan bonded over how to say "smashing beautiful" or smashing anything else in Russian. Just BTW, the way the flags work (Brits are the most particular about flags) is the red field with a smaller national flag where our stars would be means commercial, while a white field means military. So this ship is now flying a commercial Bahamian flag and a commercial British flag in these waters.

Connie and I went in different directions for the rest of the day until dinner. I went on a hike along the West Pembrokeshire Coastal path. It was low tide and the flats looked like the scenes in Chariots of Fire where the guys were running in the water and sand, except it was overcast and cool. The tide here just amazes me. It drains out and the boats in the harbor sit on the sand. Then it starts coming in across the flat sandy beach as a ripple and you can see the shallow basins fill. On the way back we passed a memorial to the "last" foreign military invasion of England, by the French in 1797 in an attempt to bring the Welsh along with the Irish (Wolfe Tone led rebellion) into the conflict to draw off British troops. (Book - The Year of the French).

Connie went to St. David's Cathedral across the peninsula from Fishguard. The church is 100 yards long but hidden in a valley to be less visible to invading Vikings.

We met up with each other and the group for dinner at Picton Castle which was built in about 1200 ad. The queen visited about 2 years ago and the staff were very proud of that. They showed where the queen sat. Before dinner there was some Welsh folk music, although revived. David our historian and a Welshman says the Welsh sing hymns not folk music.

Saturday, June 11, Holy Head, Anglesey, Wales

HH is an island attached to Anglesey Island which is attached to the rest of Wales in Great Britain. It is where William and Kate were stationed when he was in the military flying rescue helicopters.

Again Connie and I went in different directions- she on a train ride to a couple of quaint villages while I went on another bird walk along the Coastal trail. The site we visited is famous for roosting seabirds such as the ones already mentioned but also for some crow relatives called Choughs- totally black with a pink beak and fanned feathers on the wing tips. I also confirmed foxglove and gorse which is always in bloom and when it is in bloom it is a good month for kissing.
Peppier Welsh folk music on board the ship this night:

New species- Titchfield-avocet, maybe shelduck, black headed sea gull, blackbird; Tresco- pheasant, Chinese pheasant (imported); Holy Head- Choughs, jackdaw, pied wagtail, lesser black backed seagull, white throat warbler. One birding tip- lesser black backed gulls have yellow legs while herring gulls have pink legs. Tidbit- puffins beat their wings 400 times per minute.

Ireland and Northern Ireland- June 12-19

Sunday, June 12, Dublin

This morning we said goodbye to the folks from the first week including Bobby and Marilyn and then went to Dublin for a bus tour, then a walking tour, and then a little exploring on our own. We could not get into the Book of Kells on our time schedule but we walked into Trinity College. I wish we had also had time for a literary tour (James Joyce, WB Yeats, GB Shaw, Oscar Wilde etc) and a full Irish Revolution tour and time to walk the Georgian area near the museums but ... We did pass outside St Patrick's and Christchurch Cathedrals. Then we branched off for lunch and a tour at the old Jameson distillery. (We found out later that Jameson's is the way you can identify whether you are in a Catholic pub (J) or a Protestant pub (Bushmills)- look at the top shelf.) Because of the crowd we cut it pretty close getting back to the bus, but Connie found us the right bus that took us all the way back to the dock.

Restaurant from Ulysses with JJ's photo.

And here is the link to the NG/Lindblad guest slide show for this part of the trip:

Click here to see your voyage portfolio

Monday, June 13, Cobh and Kinsale

Cobh (also known as Cove, and Queenstown after Victoria's visit and back to Cobh after 1922) is the place from which a lot of the ships taking emigrants from Ireland left.

The first stop there was a memorial to the immigrants showing 16 year old Annie Moore and her two brothers on the way to join the rest of their family in America in 1991.  Annie was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island.

 Then we went into the Cobh Historical Center which is an extension of the train station and was very well done. It has exhibits about Irish emigrant starting with indentured servants being sent to Virginia in 1620, then others to Barbados in 1700s. The main emphasis is on The Titanic which was built in Belfast, went to Southampton to take on passengers and then to Cobh as its last stop. 123 got on and 7 got off in Cobh. The next emphasis was on the Lusitania which was torpedoed 35 miles offshore from Cobh and where the rescuers brought the 700 plus survivors after the accident (overwhelmed the town like Gander after 9/11 and very supportive to the survivors too).

We wandered the town a bit and then went to Kinsale where Don Herlihy gave my group a totally engrossing tour of the Spanish Armada invasions and the battle of Kinsale, the medieval village and life in general trying to scratch out a living in the little town.

There was a woman here who had worked in NYC and who owned property here. When 9/11 happened, because there are so many Irish in NY especially in the Fire Dept., she wanted to commemorate them in some way and set off a grove of trees, one per fireman (343) who died, in a beautiful spot overlooking the bay. We visited there and it is as moving as the DDay graveyard in France.

Speaking about emigrants earlier, a little bit about the Irish Potato Famine:

In the 1840s, there were about 8.5 mm people in Ireland and 5.5 mm depended on the potato crop. I won't get started on the terrible things the Brits did to drive the Irish to poverty and almost to extinction. The potato arrived from South America in the 16th century and dependence built and built. In the 1840s it was such a hard hard life that the Irish male subsisted on 46(!) potatoes a day and 36 for the women. In the middle of the 1840s the potato blight arrived with some fertilizer imported from Mexico to England. the fungus spread by air and when it hit Ireland a healthy crop in the morning could be blighted fully by the afternoon. Inheritance passed to all the sons earlier but switched to the oldest as the plots became smaller so by this time there was no choice but to emigrate. I think about 3 mm left. (The Irish language suffered a lot from this diaspora too.)

Tuesday, June 14, Skellig Islands, Basket Islands, and Dingle Peninsula

Monks from about 500-1100 ad. Site where George Lucas filmed the last scene of the most recent Star Wars movie.

 It turned out to be too remote and too expensive so they have now recreated it on the Dingle Peninsula. Huge gannet colony (37000 breeding pairs) along with other seabirds. Gray seal colony (Roman noses and eyes apart compared to Harbor seals which look more like dogs with eyes set apart). Then Tom Crean tour (Tom Crean the Antarctic exploration companion of Shackleton and Scott, not the basketball coach of Indiana). He was from Dingle and after his polar exploits and WWI came back to open the South Pole Inn. Because he was Irish and served in the British navy, due to the revolution and the idea of collaborators, he never said anything orally or in writing about the Antarctic time, even to his family. We met with his biographer Michael Smith and bought a copy of the photo edition.

In preparation for this vacation we watched Michael Collins about the 1922 Irish Revolution and saw where it was happening in Dublin, and then we watched Ryan's Daughter. RD was filmed in Dingle and we saw several of the sites. One thing I missed in watching the movie but now get is how the Irish are balancing their Christianity with superstition from their pagan pasts.

One of the expedition specialists on this trip was born in the Dingle area and he said his house did not get electricity until 1979.

Another tidbit- 180,000 archaeological sites in Ireland. While I only gave How the Irish Saved Civilization by Cahill three stars, I am beginning to appreciate it more as I see these deserted places where the monks retired to. We watched a documentary on a psalter found in a peat bog here in 2005 that is dated from way back 500 ad or so and is covered in papyrus so the scholars are wondering about a link to Coptic Christianity.

Wednesday, June 15, Aran Islands, Inishmore, and the Cliffs of Moher

We visited a small church from about 1000 and then climbed to this castle or ritual site with great but dangerous views of the Cliff. The scholars can't decide on the use. The landscape is flat cracked limestone with a thin (1 inch) layer of soil. The plots are walled off by stone and the farmers each had a right to a small bit of area on the coast to get seaweed which they used for fertilizer.

The odd rock here is a glacial erratic- ie dropped from the glacier as it receded but really from nowhere near here.

After that we went by water to the Cliffs to marvel at the geology and to watch the seabirds. Finally a pretty relaxing day.

One of the historians on board, an Irishman, pointed out that the Orion on this trip is the biggest ship to enter Galway Bay since the French in 1798.

Common dolphin at play around the ship (not my photo)

Thursday, June 16, Connemara

Today we see bogs of peat for the first time, a plant called bog cotton which has soft, silky flowers, peat harvesting by machine and by hand, and the piles of peat drying for collection and burning. 80 or 90 percent of the bogs have already been harvested but there is plenty of peat in this low populated area where speaking Irish is more prevalent than English.

Connie went to a sheep farm to watch the dogs work and see the shearing of sheep while I went on the cultural and archeological tour including a 3 or 4 mile hike around Omey Island, which really was a walk out across the sand at low tide and then a beach walk with a stop to see some middens (places where Mesolithic man threw his waste) and an old burial site long forgotten and only found because the rabbits have been bringing up human bones as the dig their burrows.
New species- Sand Martin.

Connemara is definitely wild, a well described part of the Wild Atlantic Way which we have been following by sea instead of by car.

Early return to the ship for a lecture on stone age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age man in Ireland.

This is a classic Irish work boat, supported in classic Irish fashion:

A smaller version able to be lifted by 4 men is called a curragh. A skin version of that is what St. Brendan sailed in.

Friday, June 17, Donegal, Glencolmcille, Killybegs

Short hike, Williamsburg like village of 3 different styles of houses from 1700s to 1900s, a lot of discussion about Irish plantations and what they did to reduce the Irish speakers, and about a remarkable Father McDyer who singlehandedly sparked an economic revival in this area and brought tourism to it thru the cultural center.

St. Colmcille left to found the Iona monastery from Killybegs (now a commercial fishing center) in 597.

In the late afternoon we went to a hotel bar and listened to a wonderful Irish group from Cork, Socks in the Frying Pan.

Saturday, June 18, Portrush, Bushmills, and Belfast, all in Northern Ireland, part of the U.K.

The event of the day was a 4 or so mile hike along the Giants Causeway Coastal Walk which was rigorous yet worth it for the scenery. The Causeway itself is a bigger version of what we have seen in Mammoth at the Devil's Postpile.

After that we went about an hour by bus into Belfast in time to see all the green shirted folks getting ready for the Ireland vs Belgium football match. Hmm, supporting the country they are not in.

The guide on the bus explained the UK Ireland issues very well but I can't do it justice here. However I did understand it for a minute or so.

In Belfast we went to the Titanic Center- a very good exhibit with lots of personal displays, diagrams, explanations of how it was built, all culminating in a long video of footage from the wreck discovered by Ballard in 1985.

We have been incredibly lucky with the wind, sun, rain and waves this trip. It is probably not always as good as we have had it. 

Home tomorrow.