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Analgesic Travelled to Ireland!

Marina and I are working on our next game and in search of some visual inspiration, decided to visit Ireland for 10 days. This was motivated by some other research on Christianity and Ireland that Marina was doing, and loosely also on me being a quarter Irish and having not learned or interacted with much of that side. (Note that the game we're working on itself is not about or set in Ireland or Christianity).

The trip was really good overall, definitely memorable, and we're still processing it slowly. It was quite intense on the days with 2 (or more!) hikes. I got tons of very good spatial and landscape references, Marina as well, focusing on texture references for later 3D modeling. It was neat to travel around a place with a lot of layers of history, some of which are so far back that modern Irish culture's connection to them are to an extent collectively interpreted (vs. rooted in explicit texts).

So as to help anyone who'd like to travel around Ireland, I've typed up notes and thoughts about each place we visited as well as included a map of our driving route. We're still sort of processing the trip so it's fairly straightforward notes. Hope you enjoy it! Leave any questions in the comments.

- Melos Han-Tani

Map Link

Highlights (Summarized)

• Rock of Dunamese
• Slieve Bloom - Gorteenameale Nature Walk and Knockbarron Woods
• The Burren (Slieve Carran Brown Trail, Giant's Playground)
• Gap of Dunloe
• Ballyhahill River Walk
• Tomies Woods (O'Sullivan's Cascade and 2nd half of the clockwise route)
• Cashelkeelty Stone Circle
• Independence Museum Kilmurry
• Ballysaggartmore Towers
• Irish National Heritage Park
• Glendalough National Park - Miners' Village

Rating Scale

I'll be using the official Analgesic Broom scale to rate these places. Note that these reflect my personal tastes. Except for some hotels and restaurants, everything was at worst vaguely interesting, so overall it was a great trip!

I'll be leaving out restaurants unless they were particularly bad or good.

🧹 = Not BAD per se, but either very touristy/stressful, or I would pass on this unless it's very convenient or you're looking to fill time.

I would categorize the below as all "Good":

🧹🧹 = Cool, and worthwhile experience - if it's on the way.

🧹🧹🧹 = Worth going out of the way for!

🧹🧹🧹🧹 = Worth planning your trip around and I would revisit this place

The Map

You can use the map to see where we drove each day, the layer names correspond to the days here.

Day 1

🧹🧹 St. Brigid's Monastery and Round Tower

• 🧹🧹 Monastery: This is an old, still active church with a nice interior and graveyard outside. The interior has a small exhibit about the usage of the church.
• 🧹🧹.5: The Round Tower - is one of the tallest in Ireland - as a bonus, you can visit the top! It was a cool experience to climb the rickety wooden ladders. There's a tower attendant who gives you a certificate if you reach the top. One can imagine being a monk, standing at the top...

🧹🧹🧹🧹 Rock of Dunamese

• The ruins of a fort, built on the hidden remains of another fort! This was one of my favorites of the trip and my favorite ruins of the trip. You walk up a series of hills, through ruined entryways, and reach the top, which is a fairly large structure of ruins you can walk around in. It looks neat from different angles and has great views of the surrounding landscape. A woman played a sheep-skin drum here while chanting and explained that she was resonating with the earth.

Good BNB - Ivyleigh House (Portlaoise)

• Run by a couple, this is a beautifully kept mansion with old-style rooms. Some furnishings were a bit dated but the breakfast was really nice and had a few choices outside of the Irish Breakfast. They have free parking around back.

Day 2

🧹 🧹 🧹 Slieve Bloom - Gorteenameale Nature Walk

• Location: https://goo.gl/maps/JXagCzP4s6qNJwu26



• This is a trail that isn't marked on Google Maps, we passed it completely by chance and decided to hike it. If you visit Slieve Bloom's website, they have other trails, and I assume that this walk is part of one of the bigger loops, but I couldn't find which one.
• This walk is cool, it reminds me of the mountainous areas of the game Trails in the Sky. It starts with a high-altitude feeling walk into some woods, with the occasional vista and view of Blanket Bog ecosystems. Eventually it culminates in a vista and another walk to some Blanket Bog you can walk around in!

🧹 🧹 🧹 Slieve Bloom - Knockbarron Woods

• A loop trail with interesting "Esker" systems - raised walkways formed by glaciers and rocks the glacier would pick up along the way. This is a fairly varied woodsy hike. I liked it less than Gorteenameale (some similarity to hikes I've been on in Japan) but it was still very nice.

Note on Galway

• Galway has a few Michelin star restaurants, we planned to go to Loam but they closed for an emergency. We ended up skipping Galway.

Average Hotel - Kinvara Guesthouse (Kinvarra)

• I can't remember anything about this hotel room. It's above a supermarket and I had my taste of some European Candy (A Boost Bar...wow...!)
• It also marked our second Irish Breakfast. We had "Full Irish Breakfast" at like, every single place almost. You will be eating this a lot in Ireland as a tourist. It's canadian bacon, fried eggs, black and white pudding (I loved these), irish breakfast sausages (much milder and gentler taste than the overspiced and greasy stuff I had in the USA), toast, Irish Soda Bread (wow! I love this bread), and pan-fried tomatoes. None of them were bad, but most were average. This was an average one.

Day 3

🧹 🧹 🧹 🧹 Burren National Park - Slieve Carran - Brown Trail

• A highlight of the trip. The Burren is an extraordinary landscape of rough limestone terrain with these fascinating cracks that are sometimes quite deep, and very fun to look at and photograph. There's a lot of wild insect and plant life here, too.
• There are also these long, old stone walls. Partway through the Brown Trail, it goes into some small, mossy woods which look completely different from the surrounding landscape. There's the ruins of an old cave and tiny church which were neat, followed by some more tricky hiking before looping around.

🧹🧹🧹 Yellow Trail

• A local told us about some old village ruins somewhere, we tried to find them and failed and instead found the other trail around Slieve Carran, the Yellow one. It went through some similar terrain so we only did a little of it. Perhaps you can find the ruins...

🧹🧹🧹 Burren National Park - Giant's Playground

• Similar rocky terrain, but you get to see a beautiful and clear lake/swamp kind of landscape. There's also a really long hiking trail that goes up into the nearby slanted mountains if you desire. This was fun because we just looked at a map and saw the lake and decided to try to get there.

🧹 Cliffs of Moher

• Sort of a mistake to go after hiking so much, but also fairly crowded, expensive and honestly not that different from just looking at the cliffs online, as they are cliffs and you can only get so many vantage points. I would absolutely avoid this if you're driving as it's kind of out of the way.

Strange Hotel - Greenhills 4-Star Hotel Conference & Leisure Centre (Limerick)

• I learned a lot staying at this place, one lesson being "if the name has "4-Star" in it then maybe use caution." Maybe it will be on a Gordon Ramsay show one day.

Day 4

🧹🧹🧹 Ballyhahill River Walk

• The hometown of my great-great grandmother! (Did you know I'm 1/4 Irish? Thoughts on that later...). We were planning to drive through, but Marina found a riverwalk here and it surprisingly ended up being a trip highlight.
• It's a very short walk along a shallow river with beautiful tree coverage and mossy, small rock waterfalls. You can even jump down onto the rocks at some points.
• To the right of the trail are these woody overhangs that you see on many trails (where the ground is vertically displaced from the trail), but for some reason this trail formed these really interesting, muddy, dirt-esque root caverns.

🧹🧹🧹 Killarney National Park - Tomies Woods and O'Sullivan's Cascade

• A long (but gentle) hike into some Oak forests. The first half is pretty straightforward/well-kept so it's not as exciting as other hikes, but the 2nd half (which only Marina did) was cooler as you get to see the nearby mountains and the terrain changes a bit. There are wild deer here and you can step off the trail to look int he woods!
• O'Sullivan's Cascade is a downwards side trail going down to the lake and then a cool river that leads to a very lush waterfall. I liked this part a lot.

🧹🧹🧹🧹 Gap of Dunloe

• Personally I don't know if I could handle the scariness of sitting through a drive here again, but this is an incredible drive (if the weather is good) that is (as I realized while there haha) reference for the first area of Death Stranding (used to good effect.)
• We drove from north to south. The first parts are shared with sheep, bikers, walkers and even horseback carriages! But those eventually phase out and it's only the occasional hiker, car and sheep (ha, ha)
• You get a ton of amazing views of the valley, lakes, various rocks, etc. We didn't have time or energy to step out and walk around, but that would be really fun. I saw some kids running around and stuff. It seems like some people hike this gap as well.
• The back end of the drive is the "Black Valley", a lot of cool terrain (...and scary) terrain as well.

Good Hotel and Restaurant: Lagom (Kenmare)

• Lagom was a really nice and comfy place to stay. They give you a free cupcake. The restaurant is pricey but tasty and unique. The breakfast wasn't as good but it was still well done.
• Kenmare is a nice town as well to stay in. There was a music festival when we went, and some local things to see like Kenmare Lace (where we learned about the art of lace), some churches, and nice gift shops.

Day 5

🧹🧹 Ring of Beara: Wild Atlantic Way Discovery Point

• Unique seaside terrain and barnacle-laden rocks on a coastal detour road in the Ring of Beara (A mountainous and forested peninsula on the SW Coast of Ireland).

🧹🧹🧹 Ring of Beara: Cashelkeelty Stone Circles

• Three hikes in one parking spot! The first is the pine and clover forest directly from the parking area. It has this nicely structured, sloped terrain that felt like a Dark Souls 2 outtake.





• The 2nd hike is the actual trail that goes through some woods, to a rocky valley / sheep grazing area leading uphill to some huge stone circles and giant boulder hills. I loved this hike a lot! It has a great view of Beara and you can even see the aforementioned beach area from up there.

🧹🧹 Ring of Beara: Loop of Doorus

• The other walking trail accessible from the parking spot. It's some fairly okay woods with some neat stuff that goes along the lake.

Note on Beara

• There's a lot more to Beara you can see (I learned about the place from this cool youtube channel) - we wanted to see some sea caves, copper mines, but didn't have time to see it (as there are no hotels on Beara and most BNBs were booked.) Also the driving there is fairly tricky and we didn't want to deal with it for a second day. I hear Allihies is a nice place to stay if you can find a place!

Decent BNB - Sea Hill BNB (Castletownbere)

• This was a friendly BNB with okay food and a nice room.
• A note on the town: A harbor town with lots of fisheries. The restaurants were all cash only for some reason. The town is OK but it's the only place to eat around.

Day 6

🧹🧹 Cahervagliar Ring Fort

• An old ring fort located near some farms. Some cool hilly grass terrain.

🧹/🧹🧹 Glenview Gardens

• A place we went to fill time in the day. It's a huge estate turned into a lot of hedges and small themed gardens. Most are fairly kitschy - lots of animal statues. It has maybe the saddest "Chinese Garden" I've seen but there were some interesting/unique things here to make up for it. Also it's fine because it's Ireland and it's not the place I'd go for a Chinese Garden...
• We also considered going to West Cork Model Railway Village around Clonakilty, but didn't.

🧹🧹🧹 Independence Museum Kilmurry

• A local-run museum with lots of info about Ireland in the 1800s/1900s relating to the famine and independence-related events as they relate locally. First-hand accounts, artifacts, very friendly docent.

Decent Hotel - Oriel House Hotel (Ballincollig)

• Room kinda noisy in the evening due to a wedding party?
• Smells like my grandma's apartment.
• The breakfast has a pancake machine that was surprisingly good.
• This hotel is near Cork, which could be good to go to for some museums or if you want to see Blarney Castle (we didn't go as we were worried it'd be crowded/lots of queueing)

Day 7

🧹🧹 Mallow Castle

• A big, ruined castle you can look at from the outside. We couldn't go in, though.
• Mallow is a small town, nice to walk around in if you haven't seen one. I also saw some walking trails in the area we didn't go to.
• They have a Gamestop here which was interesting to see.

🧹🧹🧹 Ballysaggartmore Towers

• Some shitty landlord brother tried to build a bunch of castles to beat his brother. He failed, and this is the result. There are two ruins: an entry gate (which is neat, but mostly okay), and a bigger entryway crossing a valley, which I liked more. Some interesting circular rooms. There's also a nice woodsy hike with some side paths and a cool walk up a rocky river to a small waterfall.

Good restaurant - Eastenders Indian

• Great flavors here!

Average/overpriced hotel - Treacy's Waterford (Waterford)

• Booked here because there wasn't much else. More expensive than it should be and the breakfast was pretty mediocre.
• Waterford had a music/arts festival which we saw a bit of. It seemed to be a nice town to walk around in.

Day 8

🧹🧹🧹 Irish National Heritage Park

• A park split into three eras: prehistoric, christianity and normans/vikings. Historical recreations and frequent tours with nice tour guides. It was fun to see the old buildings with straw thatching, there's even an AirBNB in a ring fort recreation you can see here! Coming here helped put into context some of the layers of time in Ireland as well as the stuff about the Norman invasion.
• There's a nice selection of history books here and stories in the gift shop.

Mixed Hotel - Bridge Tavern (Wicklow)

• VERY noisy at night till 10/11 and even throughout the day due to being right above a restaurant and music venue
• Our room smelled like feet/cheese
• Dinner was not very good here.
• Strangely, the breakfast here is incredible - maybe the best of the trip. Try their pancakes and irish breakfast!

Day 9

🧹🧹🧹 Glendalough National Park - Pink and Purple Trails (Miners Village)

• The first route, Pink, was a mountainous trail (100m climb) going up into the mountains, and down a waterfall. You can merge onto much longer and higher trails if you have the energy, but we didn't. This walk was kind of similar to others we had been on so there wasn't much novelty but it was nice. The higher up parts felt more barren/deforested in a unique way we hadn't yet seen.
• The Miners Village trail was a huge and pleasant surprise though. For the first half it's a walk through some woods alongside a big lake, but the 2nd half opens up into a huge valley with beautiful views of the aforementioned mountain as well as granite-boulder filled slopes. The Miners Village is a very rocky set of ruins - some overgrown, some barren, which was fun to poke around in. The lakeshore nearby has a lot of lush vegetation and the lighting of the valley is dramatic.
• If you have the energy, the end of this trail goes up into the mountains along some rivers.
• Weather can change fast here so be careful and bring a lot of food and water as it's not a loop trail.

🧹🧹 Wicklow's Coastal Castle Ruins

• Wicklow has a nice pier and old viking ruins you can see. These were pretty to walk around in during sunset and you could even swim if you wanted to.

Day 10

Dublin

• Marina visited this LGBTQ+ friendly cafe/community space which had recently reopened: https://outhouse.ie/outhouse-cafe.html
• I had lunch at Bao House because I was dying for some east asian food. It was good!

🧹🧹 Irish National Gallery / Natural History Museum

• Nice collection of European and Irish paintings with plenty of painting notes and information. I liked the collection.
• Marina also saw the Archeology and Natural History Museums which sounded good (especially the bog bodies.)

Interesting Restaurant - Mr. Fox

• A cool course-meal restaurant with creative and tasty dishes. It was a very long meal though (3 hours) and had no air conditioning which was a bit grueling for me. They can do non-dairy though!

Okay hotel - Marlin Hotel Dublin

• Very dry, but air-conditioned. Average breakfast.

Overall

• Talking to people and hearing their views on a historical moment or place made it a lot easier to put into context stuff about Ireland we'd read in books. Likewise, being in a place is a lot more memorable than simply seeing a picture.
• The most fun hikes were the more out of the way, quieter ones.
• Ireland is an interesting country since it's so dense (relative to other places) that you can honestly just type "historical landmarks" into google maps and find some cool places. The more out of the way or minor hiking trails were often great!
• Many of the national parks have great websites with information on recommended trails and intensity.
• I think you could do some of the highlights with a tour bus or guided tours, but I think driving is definitely the way to go for travelling here.

Practical Notes - Hotels, Dining, Bathrooms, Money, Masking, Bus transit, COVID

• 99% of people don't mask in Ireland, most of the ones I saw were elderly.
• Ireland (and the USA) have no testing requirements or masking requirements on planes
• Ireland doesn't have much air conditioning infrastructure as most of its climate is below 16C year-round except the summer months. Some hotel rooms may be uncomfortable at night, but I just took the covers off the comforters and many rooms have fans.
• Bring an adapter for Ireland! (Type 1363 aka Type G)
• Be careful of booking hotels that are associated with bars or pubs, they will often play live music till 10 or 11 PM.
• Hotel booking fees seem to rise 25% if you book within 24 hours.
• Bed and Breakfasts in the more popular vacation spots (Beara) tend to book really fast ahead of time. Some BNBs want you to book at least 2 nights
• Irish hotel rooms/BNBs don't have minifridges and usually don't provide tissue paper.
• Almost every dish at restaurants has dairy in some form. Usually butter, but often cheese or milk or cream. It's a bit hard to work around this so watch out.
• Portions are about the same as the USA - which is gigantic relative to some countries like Japan.
• Even though all restaurants do label allergens, many often make typos so always ask.
• Public bathrooms are very rare outside of towns - you will probably need to pee in the woods or plan around this.
• I would pack lunches or snacks as finding a place to get lunch is often impractical most of the time. Peanut Butter was great, as were Weetabix. I also would take extra toast from the hotel breakfast to eat for lunch.
• The same goes for water: bring enough for the day and have a few extra bottles in the car just in case.
• Bringing a touch debit or credit card (Visa or MasterCard) will be a huge help as that's what most people expect.
• We only needed cash for tipping at restaurants (which seems to be done via leaving money on the table), paying the occasional 2-euro toll, or paying for parking fees. In some cases we could pay tolls and parking fees via credit cards.
• You can get cash out of most ATMs, I also got cash from a bank as the teller was friendly even though they weren't supposed to do it.
• For visiting Dublin, you can buy 1 (or more) unlimited use bus passes at the Airport (or other places probably).

Driving Notes

• Plan out your parking ahead of time. Some of ireland's streets are confusing and small and it's easy to get stuck in an awkward alley or driving around in circles.
• Ireland is relatively tiny, at 33,000 sq mi. That's half of Illinois, or 20% of California! Driving across the country from Dublin to Galway takes 2.5 hours.
• In the summer, the car will get uncomfortably hot basically no matter what as (rental, at least) cars in Ireland don't have air conditioning. You'll have to drive with the windows open to counteract this.
• I didn't drive, but from what Marina said, you get used to driving on the left fairly quickly and the weirdest thing is looking back when backing up and adjusting your intuition for car width when passing or letting cars pass.
• Google Maps' estimates for driving times are based around native drivers: if the roads are unfamiliar and you're not used to driving on Ireland's many narrow and tricky roads, you might need to add 20-40% to Maps' time estimates to account for driving slower.
• We rented a car via DiscoverCars.com, and used Budget. For 10 days, it cost about $1000-1200, which included various damage waivers/insurance. It was about $200 more because we needed an automatic transmission. They require a 2000 Euro security deposit ON A VISA, MASTERCARD or AMEX card, UNDER THE NAME of the driver! This had trouble going through so we ended up having to buy an additional $200 or so damage insurance instead. Gas for the whole trip cost roughly 150 euro (we)

Budget

• Total: ~5000 Euro for the 10-day trip (booked only 3 weeks in advance with many hotels 2 days before). You could save a lot by booking more in advance and staying at hostels or BNBs, or driving manual transmission, eating cheaper dinner, etc. You could probably get a 10-day trip for two people down to 2500-3000 Euro.
• BNBs averaged around 70-120 Euro, hotels, 150-200, the worst being around 240 even. We stayed 10 nights and the hotel costs were around 1500 Euro I'd guess.
• Breakfast is included at most places. Lunch tended to be shelf-stable goods and was fairly cheap (< 100 euro for the whole trip). Dinners were often not included and ran us from 20-40 Euro (usual) to 80 at fancier places. Dinner was probably 400-500 Euro total.
• Gas: We refilled twice and rental cars require you to top up, so this cost 150 euro roughly.
• Airfare: 700-1200 Euro per person for summer months based on how you choose to get there.
• Car Rental: 1000-1200 Euro for 10 days of an automatic transmission. Extra 200 for another damage insurance bc we couldn't do the credit card security deposit. Got about 150 back for filling the gas up or something?
• Parking/Tolls/Bus Transit: About 50 Euro for the whole trip
• Travel Insurance: Optional, but about 100 euro for 10 days
• Phone Data Plan: essential for gps/google maps. 30-50 euro for me, depends on your carrier