It’s our last day in Ireland. We have a 7:30 pm ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard and then a three-hour drive home – back early Tuesday morning.
We’re not in a big rush though, so pack up at the Apple…
And empty all the fluids. We shouldn’t need any more water or loo stops in the van like we did yesterday.
First stop today is Waterford. It’s a city of roughly 60,000 people, so much bigger than places we’ve been to recently. One of its claims to fame is that it’s the oldest city in Ireland, having been established by the Vikings in 914.
We headed for the Waterside car park that had no height restriction. And fortunately, also had 3 campervan parking bays, one of which was free.
We then stopped at the Park Lodge Cafe in People’s Park. Good GF options, so I had a toastie. Coffee was good and we sat outside amid workmen painting and distressing the cafe seating.
There were three women sat at the table behind us and one was swearing like a trooper. There were mums and kids around and nobody seemed to mind the f’ing going on.
Sue broke out the GPSMyCity app and we headed for Reginald’s Tower. The first fortification on the site was wooden and Viking. The lower floors of the stone tower date from the Anglo-Norman refortification in the late 12th century, with the upper two floors added in the late 15th century.
There’s clearly a big Viking thing in Waterford, with longboats etc. So we booked onto the King of the Vikings experience. It was going to be a talk and a VR experience, but it didn’t start until 2, so we had about 2 hours to kill on the walking tour.
The replica Viking house is based inside the ruins of the 13th-century Greyfriars friary, so I’m adding that to my list: 14.
Sue decided to play herself at street chess. Which entailed setting the board up and losing against herself.
Lots more churches on the walking tour.
These are the old city walls, not derelict churches.
And so it was 2 and time for our Viking experience. There’s a replica thatched Viking house set up inside the ruined friary. An anthropological archaeologist gave us a talk about the Vikings (Norwegian vs Danish) etc. for about 20 mins and we got to hold some replica weapons. Then we had a 15-minute VR “experience”. Not bad as these things go, about 5/10 I’d say. Sue wasn’t impressed, and I nodded off. But on the whole okay. We got to see what they think Waterford would have looked like in Viking times, with Reginald’s Tower made of wood etc. Lots of maps of where they think people were moving to and from.
And that was Waterford. Good to have done the walking tour and the Vikings but no need to go back.
Tintern Abbey
We had an hour or so to kill, so decided to go to Tintern Abbey. It was a bit of a detour but roughly on our way to Rosslare. We’d probably passed it on our first day, no idea why we didn’t go then, I suspect we just hadn’t got up to speed with everything yet.
And it’s not THAT Tintern Abbey. This one was founded in 1200 and initially populated by Cistercian monks from the one near Chepstow.
So this definitely counts as a derelict church. And we passed another on the way from Waterford too. So by my ralaxed and inattentive derelict-church-count, I make this Tintern Abbey number 16 for the trip. I doubt we see 3 or 4 a year in the UK. Hmmm.
We didn’t have a lot of time, so decided not to go in. The entrance fee was only €5, very reasonable and similar to other admission fees we’d seen for other monuments.
So we wandered through the grounds to a bridge and took some pictures.
Then off to Rosslare. We were there by about 5:30, in plenty of time for the 7 crossing. There’s always lots to look at when you’re at a port. Other travellers, how they load the boats, what the customs guys are up to. We had a hot chocolate from the vending machine (no in-person service like at Fishguard) and boarded at just gone 7. We were late leaving but made up the time and arrived in Fishguard just about bang on the 11 o’clock we were supposed to get there at.
Then a blast back through Wales to home – nothing to report there.
And that’s the end of the trip.
Ireland is a stunningly beautiful place. Especially the west coast. The people are super friendly and it’s not as busy (at least we didn’t find it to be) as we were led to believe. There are hundreds of campervans and motorhomes doing what we did at any one time in the summer. But that’s what the west coast seems to be about, tourism. So nobody seems to get too upset with all the big vans roaming the often narrow roads. We’ll have to see how long that view lasts.
I was surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) that we saw so many Irish doing the sort of touring that we were doing. Some of it was that people were clearly hiring campervans when they arrived in Ireland. So some of the vans with Irish number plates were rentals rather than Irish people on holiday. And the same went for hire cars too – lots of people seemed to have hired cars to do their tour. But there were also lots of Irish on holiday as well.
We also saw a lot of Northern Irish plates and talked to people who said they’d never taken their van out of Ireland. But we also saw a lot of German, French, Spanish and Italian vans. Not so many Dutch, which is odd, as the Dutch seem to roam all over the rest of Europe.
We’ll definitely be going again. Perhaps do some more of the west coast, but also probably do the Ring of Kerry again and then head north from there.
Ireland – highly recommended.
(There will be one more post on this topic – “What worked and what didn’t work”)
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