slowly she turned

Just down the road from the cemetery was the ruins of one of the castles of Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen.

This was most of our group^

Then we stopped at one of the most spectacular views of my entire trip. Again, the video is showing in landscape view, which is not how I filmed it and I hope to figure out how to correct it later because it is skewed horizontally. Here is a link to it on my Facebook page.

We broke for a late lunch at the Beehive Restaurant in Keel where I had fish cakes and a local stout and a lovely rhubarb crumble for dessert.

Then our guide used a bit of his connections to manage to get a parking spot at Keem Bay beach. This is at the far western edge of the island. The arched bridge that we had begun our art exercises with was here, and running out to the water on the beach was a stream that reportedly carried raw amethysts down from an old amethyst quarry. We didn’t have much time to spend here, and I spent most of it searching for amethysts. I didn’t find any, but I enjoyed it.

Then we turned around and went to another beach at Dookinelly, near Keel. There was a labyrinth there in the grassy area just above the beach. And for some reason, maybe tiredness, I forgot to either walk it or take a photo.

You know that I wanted to sit down and pick through these rocks all day. I was good and only took one with me.

The holy well and the cliffs behind the beach were equally compelling, and the sheep were climbing these steep inclines with no concerns whatsover.

I couldn’t quite make it to St. Fintan’s well. It was steeper than it looks here. I was concerned about falling down the hill.

I suppose it is the sheep that make this interesting texture on the hillsides.

We then cut across the island to the village of Dugort where we visited Red Fox Press, a sweet wee artist shop with hand printed books and prints and a Polaroid museum.

There were too many people inside for me to get a good photo inside, and it was dark, but the outside was fun.

^All of this is mint.

By the end of this day, I was totally exhausted and stumbling. On this night, I planned to skip breakfast and sleep another hour in the morning. I slept really well for the first time in four nights!