Our Irish Jaunt 2

For our first full day out in Ireland we made a pilgrimage around the fabled Ring of Kerry. Coaches are required to drive the Ring in an anti-clockwise direction so that they do not meet each other on the sometimes narrow roads. You might bear this in mind if you ever decide to drive the ring yourself as you would probably prefer not to meet an oncoming 40 foot coach!

My dear DH is enjoying his first (and actually, his only) Irish coffee at the Kerry Bog Village near Killorglin (complete with Guinness shirt!).

As well as being the site of the Red Fox Inn, the Kerry Bog Village is home to a collection of reconstructed cottages which illustrate rural Irish life in the eighteenth century.

Turf or Peat is still used on fires in Ireland today and whoever set this fire knew what they were doing as it was burning merrily. My DH and I had a feeble peat fire when we stayed in a cottage in Connemara a few years ago. There is a definite knack to burning peat, or at least, to getting it going!

You can see here peat stacked up outside the cottage ready for use. The peat is traditionally cut by hand with a peat spade and left to dry in heaps before being stored for later use. The tradition is still followed in parts of Scotland as witnessed by Helen Suzanne .
To be continued........