In Cork City, Farmgate’s sister café, upstairs at the famous redbrick English Market, offers breakfasts and lunches made with impeccable ingredients from the market’s plethora of butchers, fishmongers, produce stands, bakeries, and cheese purveyors. Nearby, prized Café Paradiso serves dinners with locally sourced vegetables crafted into dishes by Cork native chef Denis Cotter that will tempt even stubborn meat eaters. (Beamish ice cream made with local stout meets no resistance either.) South of Cork City, seaside Kinsale, with its harbor full of bobbing boats, is called Ireland’s Culinary Capital for its International Gourmet Festival every October. Great dining can be had year-round at its many fine restaurants, such as Fishy Fishy, where treats include warm seafood salad tossed with sweet-spicy sauce and haddock battered with locally brewed lager.
Cork’s guesthouses welcome with excellent food too. At Longueville House, his ancestral 18th-century Georgian mansion, acclaimed chef William O’Callaghan whips up salmon, trout, lamb, pork, and game (often smoked in their private smokehouse) from his 500-acre estate. He also offers Ireland’s only apple brandy. Elegant yet relaxed Ballyvolane, is another well-known Georgian inn, renovated in the Italianate style, and near the salmon-rich Blackwater River. Ballyvolane hosts four-course dinners showcasing local artisanal specialties; the proprietor’s father tends the vegetable garden and livestock. Homemade cookies and cordials await visitors in each of the six guest rooms, and the kitchen can prepare picnic lunches, handy for visits to their Blackwater Salmon Fishery, which affords angling guests private access to the storied river.
WHERE: Cork City is 76 miles/123 km southeast of Shannon. VISITOR INFO: www.goodfoodireland.ie. BALLYMALOE: Tel 353/21-465-2531; www.ballymaloe.ie. Cost: 5-course dinner $105. JAMESON EXPERIENCE: Tel 353/21-461-3594; www.tours.jamesonwhiskey.com. FARMGATE: in Midleton, tel 353/21-463-2771, in Cork City, tel 353/21-427-8134; www.farmgate.ie. CAFÉ PARADISO: Tel 353/21-427-7939; www.cafeparadiso.ie. Cost: lunch $30. FISHY FISHY: Tel 353/21-4700415; www.fishyfishy.ie. Cost: lunch $50. LONGUEVILLE HOUSE: Tel 353/22-47156, in the U.S., 800-323-5463; www.longuevillehouse.ie. Cost: from $250; dinner $90. BALLYVOLANE: Tel 353/25-36349; www.ballyvolanehouse.ie. Cost: from $210; dinner $70. BEST TIMES: Sep for Skibbereen’s Taste of West Cork Festival, Cork’s EAT Cork Festival, and Midleton’s Food and Drink Festival; Oct for Kinsale’s International Gourmet Food Festival.
The Island’s Northernmost Fringe
WILD DONEGAL
County Donegal, Ireland
Rural, rugged, and always breathtaking, Donegal has a distinctive, top-o’-the-world feel. Its sea-torn coastline, in Ireland’s northwestern corner, faces the open ocean in the direction of Iceland (see p. 354) and Greenland (see p. 345), and its wild waves, seaside caverns, waterfalls, forests, and mountains afford boundless opportunity for outdoor adventure. Explore it all by sea kayaking, scuba diving, hiking, surfing, or wildlife-watching. You’ll find whales, basking sharks, and a variety of birds from puffins to peregrine falcons here.
The 30-mile-long Slieve League peninsula has some of Europe’s tallest sea cliffs. It is Donegal’s dramatic highlight, with a narrow trail along its top, the heart-stopping One Man’s Pass. On the same peninsula, you’ll find Slí Cholmcille’s Way, a marked long-distance walking route that leads to graceful Assarancagh (Eas a’ Ranca) Waterfall and stunning Glengesh Pass with its verdant mountains, valleys, and striking switchbacks. (If you’re not up for exploring by foot, you can always drive the pass.) Glenveagh National Park—with placid lakes, heathered bogland, grazing red deer, and golden eagles overhead—is an essential wilderness excursion with a neo-Gothic castle at its heart.
The region has tenaciously preserved its heritage. For many, Irish Gaelic is the primary language here, including on Tory Island, where the year-round population of almost 200 elect their own “king.” Currently he is Patsy Dan Rogers, an original member of the Tory School of Art (a celebrated style of primitive painting) who shows up to greet all passenger ferries.
On Donegal’s northern periphery, a gorgeous fjord, Lough Swilly (Lake of Shadows), cuts a deep-set inlet. Deserted beaches skirt the edges of Swilly, where Rathmullen House is found, an informal and welcoming 19th-century guesthouse set in lush gardens, whose award-winning restaurant celebrates the local bounty.
Across Swilly, the pre-Celtic fort Grianan Ailligh, restored in the 1800s, stands on a hill with magnificent views, including the Inishowen Peninsula to the north. Drive the Inis Eoghain 100, a scenic 100-mile loop, and stop at the northernmost point in Ireland, Malin Head’s rocky promontory. Due to its northern location, summer skies stay light long into the night, and as autumn approaches, a rare glimpse of the aurora borealis might be seen.
Ireland’s highest sea cliffs lie along the Slieve League peninsula.
WHERE: 168 miles/271 km northwest of Dublin. VISITOR INFO: www.discoverireland.ie/northwest. NATIONAL TRAILS OFFICE: www.irishtrails.ie. RATHMULLEN HOUSE: Tel 353/74-915-8188; www.rathmullenhouse.com. Cost: from $215; dinner $65. When: Mar–Oct; weekends only Nov, Dec, and Feb. Closed Jan. BEST TIMES: May–Aug for nicest weather; Jul for Earagail Arts Festival; Aug for guided hill walks and bird- and whale-watching during National Heritage Week.
Flavors Along the Liffey
EDIBLE DUBLIN
Dublin, Ireland
Once known solely as a pub-grub destination, Dublin has—over the last few decades—become a gastronomic contender. Frenchman Patrick Guilbaud first opened his restaurant here in 1981, underpinning his elegant French menu with the finest Irish ingredients—fillet of Wicklow lamb, Clogher Head lobster, west coast king scallops—and paving the way for a citywide culinary awakening. Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud continues its reign in the Merrion Hotel, which is composed of four conjoined 18th-century town houses that feature lavish period furnishings, rococo plasterwork ceilings, peat-burning fireplaces, and a collection of Irish art. During Art Tea, the staff serves pastries inspired by the surrounding artwork, including miniature renditions of paintings, accompanied by a harpist on Sundays.
Like his French neighbor, Kevin Thornton reveres Ireland’s bounty, evident at the restaurant that bears his name in the Fitzwilliam Hotel and overlooks St. Stephen’s Green. He accompanies his signature dish, slowly braised suckling pig and trotter pomme Maxine, with a sauce of poitín, illegal Irish moonshine, one of the world’s strongest liquors.
Across the River Liffey, Chapter One Restaurant pays homage to Dublin’s obsession with all things literary. An adored institution in the basement of the Dublin Writers Museum (see p. 61), the former home of whiskey distiller John Jameson, Chapter One has a refined cellar-vault ambience with stacked-stone walls, arches, and a green-veined marble bar. A charcuterie trolley with meats cured and smoked by artisans, and a chef’s table with a view of the kitchen’s “culinary theater,” make it a standout. Dublin has another literary-themed restaurant in the casual, homey Winding Stair, named after a W. B. Yeats poem. A landmark in the 1970s, when it hosted events for the creative community, it still has a popular bookshop beside the restaurant, which showcases informal fare like Irish seafood chowder with chorizo. High ceilings, old girders, sofas, bookshelves, bent-wood furniture, and a winding staircase make it heaven for hungry bookworms.
Share the Irish culture’s collective love of the leaf with tea at Temple Bar’s Clarence Hotel, owned by U2’s Bono and The Edge. The Clarence’s “enhanced” Afternoon Tea—champagne or cosmopolitans alongside traditional tea, sandwiches, and patisseries—is served beneath the 20-foot ceilings of its Tea Room Restaurant and in the Study Café, with wainscoting and antique refectory table, as well as in the Octagon Bar.
RESTAURANT PATRICK GUILBAUD: Tel 353/1-676-4192; www.restaurantpatrickguilbaud.ie. Cost: dinner $170. MERRION HOTEL: Tel 353/1-603-0600; www.merrionhotel.com. Cost: from $260 (off-peak), from $300 (peak); Art Tea $50. THORNTON’S: Tel 353/1-478-7008; www.thorntonsrestaurant.com. Cost: dinner $110. CHAPTER ONE: Tel 353/1-873-2266; www.chapteronerestaurant.com. Cost: dinner $85. THE WINDING STAIR: T
el 353/1-872-7320; www.winding-stair.com. Cost: dinner $42. THE CLARENCE: Tel 353/1-407-0800; www.theclarence.ie. Cost: from $160 (off-peak), from $250 (peak); afternoon tea $30. BEST TIME: Jun for A Taste of Dublin Festival.
Monuments of the Republic’s Revolt for Liberty
HISTORICAL DUBLIN
Dublin, Ireland
Strategically located at Dublin’s epicenter, the General Post Office (G.P.O.) is a landmark that launched the free Irish Republic. On Easter Monday of 1916, 1,200 armed citizens who wanted a self-ruled Ireland, free from British occupation, took it over, made it their headquarters, and set up garrisons around the city. From the G.P.O.’s portico, rebel leaders announced the founding of an independent Irish state by reading their Proclamation of the Republic. Street fighting between the rebels and British armed forces, who vastly outnumbered them, lasted for close to a week. When rebel leaders surrendered, Dublin lay in ruin and the G.P.O. had burned to a mere shell. Today, it stands proudly renovated, with a sculpture of Celtic warrior Cuchulainn dedicated to the rebels, an exhibition room on the significance of the “Rising,” and portico columns still bearing bullet pockmarks.
Farther out in Dublin sits Kilmainham Gaol, where British troops incarcerated most of the Rising’s leaders before executing them by firing squad. That led to enormous public objection and, in turn, to the War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty (root of the later “Troubles” in Northern Ireland; see p. 76), and the founding of the Irish Free State. Tours through Kilmainham’s ghostly interior and outdoor execution yard are riveting.
Arbour Hill military cemetery, where most of the executed rebel leaders were buried, lies across the River Liffey—as does the Decorative Arts and History branch of the National Museum of Ireland, an imposing Neoclassical block of stone, formerly the British Royal Military Barracks. Renamed Collins Barracks after Irish nationalist leader Michael Collins, the museum’s exhibition on the Easter Rising includes an original copy of the Proclamation of the Republic.
In 1967, on the Rising’s 50th anniversary, surviving rebel (and then president of Ireland) Eamon de Valera opened Dublin’s Garden of Remembrance. A place for contemplating subjugation, resurrection, and freedom, the park features a cross-shaped pool with a mosaic of broken spears and shields, symbolizing the Celtic tradition of casting weapons into rivers after hostilities ended. Beyond is a stone-inscribed poem predicting Ireland’s rebirth, and asking the generation of freedom to remember the “Generation of the Vision.”
G.P.O.: Tel 353/1-705-8833; www.anpost.ie. HISTORICAL SITES INFO: www.heritageireland.ie/en/Dublin/. KILMAINHAM GAOL: Tel 353/1-453-5984. ARBOUR HILL CEMETERY: Tel 353/1-821-3021. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRELAND: Tel 353/1-677-7444; www.museum.ie. GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE: Tel 353/1-821-3021. HOW: Passionate historians at Rebellion Walking Tour lead groups to the locales of the Rising. Tel 353/868-583-847; www.1916rising.com. When: Mar–Oct. BEST TIME: around Easter for the Rising’s anniversary.
A Love of Language and the Written Word
LITERARY DUBLIN
Dublin, Ireland
Ireland’s deep love of words stretches back to Druidic oral poetry, Celtic myth, and Ogham-alphabet writing inscribed on stone. The illuminated manuscripts of early Christian monastic scribes and traditional storytellers called seanchaí are part of Irish heritage too. Dublin names bridges and streets after writers, erects statues and memorials to commemorate them, and designates historical houses in their honor. It awards the world’s largest literary prize every year and attracts readers and scholars to its dozens of literary pubs. In 2010, the United Nations declared Dublin an official City of Literature.
Trinity College has an impressive roster of alumni that includes writers Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett. Founded in 1592, it collectively holds more than 5 million volumes, with 200,000 of the oldest housed in the 18th-century Old Library’s main chamber, the Long Room. The ground-floor area preserves the college’s star attraction: the early medieval Book of Kells. Dating from the early 9th century, Kells depicts the Four Gospels in Latin, on 680 vellum pages, magnificently embellished with elaborate patterns and animals in rich colors.
Dubliners was the first book written by James Joyce, the city’s most famous son. His masterpiece, Ulysses, recounts a single day in Dublin—June 16, 1904 (the same day as Joyce’s first date with wife Nora)—and is the focal point of today’s quirky Bloomsday festival, drawing Joyce lovers from around the world. Often dressed in Edwardian garb—boater hats and waistcoats or long skirts—and carrying parasols, these Joyceans trace every footstep of the central characters, including those of Leopold Bloom, reliving turn-of-the-last-century Dublin. Numerous other writers are connected to Dublin, and three of Ireland’s four Nobel Prize winners for literature—George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats (see p. 72), and Samuel Beckett—were born here. The fourth, Seamus Heaney, transplanted himself here from the north.
The Writers Museum, located in an 18th-century house next to the Irish Writers Centre, is a fine place to start your visit. The museum displays books inscribed by Joyce and Yeats (who cofounded the Abbey Theatre in 1903), plus pens, typewriters, portraits, Beckett’s telephone, Brendan Behan’s union card, and Shaw’s signed refusal to provide an autograph.
Writers not only lived and drank here, but died in Dublin too: Satirist Jonathan Swift is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he was dean, and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins rests in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Celtic monks created the Book of Kells, now on display at Trinity College.
VISITOR INFO: www.dublincityofliterature.com. BOOK OF KELLS: Tel 353/1-896-2320; www.bookofkells.ie. BLOOMSDAY: Tel 353/1-878-8547; www.jamesjoyce.ie. DUBLIN WRITERS MUSEUM: Tel 353/1-872-2077; www.writersmuseum.com. BEST TIMES: Jun for Dublin Writers Festival; Jun 16 for Bloomsday; Oct for Dublin Theatre Festival.
Celebrating All Things Irish
PUBS AND ST. PATRICK’S FESTIVAL
Dublin, Ireland
Dublin’s greatest asset has always been its people and their gifts of music and gab. You’ll find boatloads of both, along with plenty of craic (Irish for “sociable good times”) when you join the locals in one of the city’s 1,000-plus pubs. Here the thick, oil-black “Dublin gargle” (Guinness) reigns as the national drink and music is almost always a welcome by-product.
Brewed in Dublin since 1769, the “poetry in a glass” was once accompanied by advertising slogans such as “Guinness is good for you!” and inspires a reverence that may explain why Ireland boasts a yearly per capita beer consumption of 131 liters (second only to the Czech Republic; see p. 289). For the full history of Arthur Guinness and his world-famous brew, spend a few fun hours at the Guinness Storehouse, the expansive former fermentation plant built in the shape of a mammoth pint glass and packing in a museum, a brewery open for tours, a restaurant, and the glass-encased top-floor Gravity Bar, with a panoramic view of Dublin.
While today’s pub count might not compare to that of the mid-18th century (when Dublin had 2,000 alehouses, 300 taverns, and 1,200 brandy stores), plenty of choice places remain to draw a creamy pint of what James Joyce called “the wine of Ireland.” Just steps from the River Liffey on Lower Bridge Street is the oldest pub in town, the lantern-lit Brazen Head. Born as a coaching inn in 1198 and licensed as a pub in 1661, it retains a timeworn charm and offers nightly musical performances.
Just off St. Stephen’s Green, O’Donoghue’s, opened in 1934, is a relative newcomer. It has always been known for its lively jam sessions, out of which sprang the ’60s folk crossover success the Dubliners. A few steps from the green on Duke Street, you’ll find Davy Byrne’s, established in 1889 and later made famous by James Joyce as a stop along Leopold Bloom’s journey in Ulysses. Enjoy a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy in tribute to Bloom’s meal, or just soak up the Art Deco surroundings, complete with murals featuring the renowned scribe.
To see more writerly haunts, join the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl, a spirited and informative tour led by actors who
share humorous anecdotes and recite lyrical lines by great Irish authors.
Pubs all across town kick into high gear when March rolls around and thoughts turn to honoring St. Patrick, the venerated patron saint of the country and the Irish Diaspora, who was born in Scotland and brought to Ireland as a slave in A.D. 432. Dublin is the home of the longest annual celebration (the largest takes place in New York City). The highlight of the 5-day festival is a parade that proudly marches down O’Connell Street, featuring drill teams, floats, and delegations from around the world. Other activities include concerts, carnival rides, and the All-Ireland finals for both Gaelic football and hurling at Croke Park stadium, both held on St. Patrick’s Day.
Live music is a tradition at O’Donoghue’s.
GUINNESS STOREHOUSE: Tel 353/1-408-4800; www.guinness-storehouse.com. BRAZEN HEAD: Tel 353/1-677-9549; www.brazenhead.com. O’DONOGHUE’S: Tel 353/1-660-7194; www.odonoghues.ie. DAVY BYRNE’S: Tel 353/1-677-5217; www.davybyrnes.com. LITERARY PUB CRAWL: Tel 353/1-670-5602; www.dublinpubcrawl.com. ST. PATRICK’S FESTIVAL: Tel 353/1-676-3205; www.stpatricksfestival.ie. When: 5 days surrounding Mar 17, parade on Mar 17.
Windswept Outposts of Gaelic Culture
ARAN ISLANDS
County Galway, Ireland
With an ever-dwindling population, the trio of windblown Aran Islands, off Ireland’s western shore, offers a window onto centuries past. Visitors come here for the moody, starkly romantic beauty, where the primary language is Irish Gaelic and the occasional pony-and-trap cart still travels the narrow roads. Over a century ago, playwright John Millington Synge immortalized the Arans—scattered as they are with Iron Age stone forts, Neolithic wedges, early Christian churches, and clocháns (monastic beehive stone huts)—as “Ireland at its most exotic, colorful, and traditional.” In the 17th century, when British penal laws dictated that the native Irish migrate west, many traveled all the way to these hardscrabble limestone islands, making do with the harsh terrain by turning sand and seaweed into fertile soil. Many of the Arans’ approximately 1,500 current residents can be counted as their descendants.
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