Lunch on the Beach - Ardmore and the Round Tower

Last week Wednesday was the first of the many lovely spring days we've had in the past week - and I just had to mark it with some of these great photos taken in Ardmore in West Waterford. One of the delights of my job as a Public Health Nurse is that I feel so lucky to be working out and about in the community doing house visits, driving through magnificent coastal countryside from place to place.

I was working in that area cross-covering for my colleague and had to make some calls there, so when it came to lunchtime I decided to take advantage of the beautifully sunny and mild day and spend it playing tourist in a place that was already starting to waken up to the caravanners who were in residence for the Easter holidays.

A number of kids were actually swimming in the sea - without wetsuits! Which really bemused me as the water must have been freezing cold - "One Swallow doesn't make a summer" came to mind, as well as the old saying "Don't cast a clout till May is out"! I sat on the sea wall near the playground with my scone and read the Irish Times, and then went for a bracing walk along the beach with a few other walkers - though they were power-walking, whereas I was just strolling along listening to The News at One on RTÉ Radio One on my phone.

The wonders of modern communications technology are nearly rendering my iPod obsolete as I find myself listening to the radio on the go as much as to podcasts. My new phone (since Christmas) is not an iPhone (much as I covet one, I wasn't prepared to wait for Vodafone to get the contract for providing it, which they've just done last month, and I had to get a replacement for my ancient Samsung clamshell which needed charging every few hours. Now I am the proud owner of a Samsung Tocco Lite which is more than enough for my needs - should I wish I could go online and browse Facebook or my blog or gmail.

After my beach stroll I drove up to the Round Tower which is Ardmore's most famous landmark, and is in the grounds of a beautiful church ruin and graveyard, dedicated to the local patron saint St. Declan. The views from the Tower area are spectacular as it is high up a hill and overlooks the bay and the cliff. The Towers were fairly ubiquitous in Ireland from the monastic era or Saints and Scholars as they were used by monks as a safe haven from the marauding Viking raiders where they went in the door high up in the tower and pulled up the ladder leaving the raiders helpless below. They could presumably continue to repel them through the slit windows, arrows or whatever weapons were handy.

After taking in the views and photographing the tower, I drove up the hill in Dysert and continued down the Cliff Road, passing the Michelin-starred Cliff House Hotel, which has got accolades far and wide for its tasteful renovation and spectacular location on the cliffside overlooking the bay. The hotel is barely visible on the photo above, as it is built almost organically following the contour of the cliffside. It is a 5-star hotel, with presumably 5-star prices too, but will be worth a lunchtime visit one of these days when I feel flush!

Enjoy the views, and maybe click on the links to read about the places that interest you - I won't lecture too much in the post as it's just meant for aesthetic pleasure! Also I am not on the payroll of Fáilte Ireland so I don't need to do any more to promote such a beautiful place as it manages to do that pretty well by its very presence. As a local character said about Lismore when Mary Robinson was President and visited the town for a Famine Commemoration, when asked in the pub that night what the President had said about the town in her speech -"she said Lismore would be a grand place if it was somewhere else"! (Apparently Mary Robinson had said that anywhere else in the world a place as special and beautiful as Lismore would be inundated with tourists probably to its detriment and how had it managed to stay a hidden jewel in the crown was a mystery - so that's how Chinese whispers can lead to things getting lost in translation in a local pub!