You say Shaboom, I say Macroom....

After Dingle we headed back to Killarney and stayed another night in a pretty little boutique hotel with views looking out into the village.

It was a rainy day so we thought we would just drive towards Macroom and see where it took us.
Dad kept calling it Shaboom and I just about drove off the road cause it was driving me batty!
On the way into Macroom, we found this lovely old cemetery and church ruins and pulled over for a closer look.

                        The views were really pretty out into the valley...

 

We had passed through Macroom on the way into Kerry and decided to come back and have a closer look. Right in the middle of town, (actually the motorway runs straight through it) is a medieval castle bulit around 1654. Sir William Penn was granted this place by the oh so generous Oliver Cromwell.

   The motorway bridge is another gorgeous marvel of architecture..

             And of course another mossy old cemetery to poke around in...

 I found this tombstone and thought it very interesting and one of these days will try to do some research into the battle it mentions.

 

Well back from my research and found a link on Wikipedia about the battle which happened very close to where we were.Click here to read more Coolavokig Ambush. It was areal hot bed of ambushes in this area, in fact it's where the famous Michael Collins was killed in a similar ambush.

The walk around Macroom was so interesting...deeking in and out of Medieval castles along the river...I even found a pretty broken piece of old pottery as a souvenir

We were in Macroom on a Sunday and at around noon we decided to go for lunch in a hotel on the main drag. Well talk about dining with the locals! It was the big Sunday buffet for many locals after church so we sat and people watched and listened to the men propped up at the bar speaking in Irish while we ate another excellent meal.

A short note: I had left my charger and extra camera battery in our room in Dingle, and didn't realize it until Macroom which is a good 3 hour drive away. So instead of going back for it we had the Oh so sweet Thomas from the Quayside B&B click here for more to put it in the post for me. Therefore there are only a few chosen pictures left and since it was nearing the end of our trip, I figured I would rough it and put the rest of my memories in the old fashioned computer...my brain.

 On the way out of the Macroom area we stopped in another pretty little Irish town called Kenmare where almost right in town is a tiny park with some ancient bronze age standing stones.  The odd thing about these is how they got to this spot since the type of rock is only found in an area many miles away and these stones weigh a few thousand pounds each....