Wednesday, September 30
Today was a drive-around day as we are here two nights.
The main event was to get to the Slieve League cliffs, reported to be the highest in Europe at 601 meters above the sea. The route to get there provided a loop to Assaranca Waterfall, which was dramatic. At the base was a wooden pole-like post and I couldn’t figure out its significance. However it was very cracked, all vertical cracks running with the grain of the wood. In the cracks were hundreds of coins. We’d seen this somewhat at the Giant’s Causeway, however it causes expansion related damage and at the Causeway it’s illegal and staff try to pull out whatever they can find. It was obvious at this post that people keep doing it. Some may find it too difficult to wedge a coin into a crack, and they just leave coins at the base of the post. Maybe people make wishes?
Close by was Maghera Beach, reported to be nice, but when we saw you had to pay for parking we turned around and headed on. We then went up to Glengesh Pass. There were great views down a valley carved by the glaciers.
Our final destination was the cliffs. We were told this was a “must see”. However, we weren’t told it was a long walk up to the viewing point. Probably at least a mile, though when going up, it seemed longer. These were not white cliffs, that we somewhat expected, as we had seen at the Seven Sisters in England. They were of a striated rock, primarily made of Dalradian quartzite, gneiss, and feldspathic sandstone. It was a perfectly beautiful day for a change with sun and blue sky. I liked how the photos turned out.
We decided to take the route back around, rather than repeat the route already taken, and end up in Killybegs. We knew of a great place for lunch from the day before. Now the weather was much improved. We walked around some – spotted a RNLI boat in the big boat shed, and spotted other fishing boats and a boat very similar to mine, only a bit bigger.
I spotted a man walking out of the boat shed in coveralls, and asked him if he worked in the fishing industry. He said yes, so I asked how many fish processing plants were in Killybegs and he thought there were about six. He then reported that due to the EU quotas the boats couldn’t fish anymore. This meant the fishermen were not working and the processing plants had no fish to process. Not good for the local economy.
