The Cliffths Of Insthanity

The big debate for me in planning our trip to Ireland this year was do we visit the Cliffs of Moher or do we not? When I first started sketching out agendas for eight nights in country, I had us in Dublin and Belfast for three nights each and Galway for two. The idea was that two nights in Galway would get us to some spots over on the west coast of the country and allow us ample time to visit the Cliffs.

Ultimately, our wish list in both Ireland and Northern Ireland and the logistics of moving from one place to the next combined with a desire to not move hotels that much (just did too much of that on other trips earlier this year) ruled out a night or two in Galway. The debate remained: Cliffs of Moher or no?

The Cliffs are undoubtedly one of Ireland's top tourist attractions, drawing well more than one million visitors per year. They are located on the Atlantic (west) coast of the country facing the open ocean and are an imposing five mile long wall of rock, emerging straight out of the sea and topping out anywhere between 500 and 750 feet in height and pretty much purely straight up vertical. On a clear day from the top of the Cliffs you can see clear across the Aran Islands to the West, way up to Galway in the north (maybe about 20 miles away) and even the all the way to the Dingle peninsula to the south, about three times the distance to Galway.

In the summer months, the Cliffs are teeming with sea birds and the beaches and ocean below host many different species of land and marine mammals. Approximately 30,000 pairs of puffins, razorbills, guillemots, fulmars and kittiwakes nest on the sheer sandstone and shale walls of this spot. In the Atlantic, you can spot minke whales, dolphins and seals and on the beaches foxes, badgers and feral goats.

O'Brien's Tower, the highest point at the Cliffs of Moher.

Despite all that hype, I still questioned if we should go. I was concerned that I would not be impressed by some cliffs. How special could these things be? I mean they are just cliffs, right? And they are not even that high. We decided a day trip from Dublin was probably worth taking a chance on it. We could spend a couple of hours at the tops of the Cliffs, head up to Doolin to hop on a boat ride to see them from the bottom and then hit Galway on the way back for some fish and chips.

Sometimes, we don't get what we want when we travel. This is especially true of sights that involve nature or that are heavily weather dependent. I have used language like "in the summer months" and "on a clear day" in this post so far. The day we visited the Cliffs was anything but clear and the summer months for the birds doesn't include September.

I grew up in England. As a kid, I always thought that the natural side of my home country was pretty vanilla. England can be beautiful, scenic, quaint, very very green and vegetables and flowers can grow gloriously based on the soil and the frequent waterings from the heavens. But when it comes to superlatives, it falls a little flat. I loved animals when I was growing up and the best mammals we could find in England in the wild were probably badgers and hedgehogs. Yawn! Add that to the fact that there are no mountains to speak of (the Pennines which top out at less than 3,000 feet do NOT count), no grand waterfalls, no great rivers and trees and forests that were just sort of normal and I wanted to get out of England to see nature.

That is how I felt about the Cliffs of Moher on a rainy day on the first day of September of 2019. It might be unfair but that's how I felt.

The Cliffs as seen from O'Brien's Tower. The best spot to see most of the Cliffs.

I tried to be impressed. I swear. We walked along the Cliffs' edge to get views from multiple points. We climbed to the top of O'Brien's Tower to get what was supposed to be the best view of the rock walls (it pretty much was, by the way). We got on a boat and motored to the base of the Cliffs rooted to the top deck of the ship the whole way so we could take everything in as much as we possibly could. It didn't work. It just wasn't happening that day for me.

I will say that the boat ride was fun. Sure, it was so rough that day that we had to be told to sit down rather than stand on the top deck for our own safety and that was probably good advice, although it was difficult to actually just put butt in seat because of the way the boat was rocking. There may have been a few sore spots from the rail we were sitting back against and holding on to (mostly) with two hands. I can attest that we were definitely more comfortable than some other passengers on the boat.

Because of the seas, it was difficult to truly appreciate what we were looking at as we cruised at the bottom of the Cliffs. We didn't even have time to take in the fact that we were looking at the Princess Bride's actual Cliffs of Insanity. Yep, these very same Cliffs were the one that Fezzik hoisted himself, Vizzini, Inigo and Buttercup to escape (momentarily) the man in black. Couldn't even bathe in the glory of that fact.

Now as we turned to head back to Doolin, we did get a sense of how awesome these cliffs could possibly be. There's a spur of land down below where O'Brien's Tower is located called Goat Island. It's a thin slice of rock topped by grass used by puffins as a nesting ground. Adjacent to Goat Island there's a shard of rock sticking straight out of the sea. The sense of mass and the vertical striations visible in the cliff face were impressive against the daintiness of those two pieces of land. We could also see a couple of stray seabirds circling around, a remnant of the thousands that had already moved on. This experience did provide some manner of salvation for our day at the Cliffs.

View of the Cliffs from our boat, the Jack B. Wet, rough and grey.

View of Goat Island and O'Brien's Tower from the south.

As the dock at Doolin came into view, the sky brightened just a bit. It was the brightest our day would get from a weather perspective. If it had only been like that all day or just for the duration of our 60 minute or so long boat ride, I'm sure our experience at the Cliffs would have been changed for the better. I'm also supremely confident that if we had been there two months earlier, sunny or not, during prime seabird nesting season, that the Cliffs would have been amazing. Missed opportunity. You can't always get what you want.

I debated whether I should write this post or not. As a rule, I've generally not written about days traveling that were not amazing. Well, other than our continual quest for our first real mass of flamingos (or is it a flamboyance?) which is still unfinished. I don't like to be negative in life but I decided to go ahead and write this anyway because there are places in this world that can be incredible one day and a complete let down the next. For me, the Cliffs of Moher were almost a complete disappointment on the day we were there. If I were doing the whole thing over again, I'd make sure I was there in July when the place is beset with puffins and all manner of other ocean birds. I bet it's totally different. That's all I got on this one.

Our ride to the Cliffs. No complaints here.

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How We Did It

Making a day trip out of the Cliffs of Moher from Dublin is a long day, especially if you choose to do everything we did in this post in addition to stopping by Poulnabrone Dolmen (totally worth it by the way) and Galway. I'd say it was a good 13 or 14 hours of total time out. There are all manner of bus tours which run to the Cliffs every day from Dublin and some even stop at Galway. We decided to do it at our own pace and rent a car which I think (just like going to the Giant's Causeway) was the right call. I did not want to be rushed on someone else's schedule on this day.

The opening hours for the Cliffs vary with the seasons. In winter, they are open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; in summer, they are open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Check their website for opening hours. Apparently they start getting crowded around 11 a.m. although we didn't find them any more full of people when we left than when we got there. There is a separate admission to O'Brien's Tower. I thought it was worth getting a little history of the property and what is truly the best view of the cliffs but it's just a 30 minute experience.

I would suggest you head to the town of Doolin to catch a boat ride to the base of the Cliffs. I could see this kind of trip being awe inspiring if it's not raining and the sea isn't choppy. We chose to sail (or more accurately motor) with Doolin2Aran Ferries who in addition to running tours to the Cliffs also ferry folks to (you guessed it...) the nearby Aran Islands. There is a schedule of departures listed on their website. We found this schedule in no way corresponded to the actual departure times, much like we found live music at pubs was not guaranteed if a pub advertised music every night on line. Don't believe Irish websites with schedules. I'd suggest you just show up and get the next boat. There are other companies right in the same spot that run similar tours. 

I know the weather was terrible when we went but I truly believe that this place would be way more interesting during seabird nesting season. I also truly believe it would have been way more crowded. I still wish it had been nesting season.

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