Again we had a fabulous day.  Our morning brought us  day was along the beach at Smerwick Harbor.  It was so wonderful walking along the beach. I love walking in the sand and crossing little streams coming into the bay.

Sometimes we were walking across a stony bed of rocks. . Mary picked up a rock and you would not believe the size of it. I took a photo of it before she put it into her backpack. This is the second rock that she has taken with her.

At One point we were trying to define where we would be able to find cowry shells.  We just couldn’t find it. So I asked a man! Diarmurd. who was out for his morning walk. We stopped in talk to him for about 10 minutes. He had no idea where they were but we were having such a great conversation about hiking, biking, and the Camino.  He invited us over for tea at his house and. served us some cake.  Another delightful experience.

After we left his house, we continued walking along the beach. We were trying to find a place where we would cut up to visit the Gallarus Oratory and Castle.  The directions we had were incorrect. Luckily Diarmurd came out again and was doing the second half of his walk. He showed us how to get where we were going.  The Oratory is from about 1300 years ago. It is an absolute amazing structure of dry rubble masonry.  It is now a national Monument. One of the amazing things is that it is still waterproof after several centuries of buffering by Atlantic gales.

We had a fabulous day and arrived at our bed-and-breakfast (Imeall an Mara) which was in Ballydavid.  We dropped off our backpacks at about 5 o’clock and took off again to walk along a beautiful pass by a wall of flowers.

We also saw the mountain on the land across the bay. It took about three hours before we finally arrived at An Bóthar in Caus.  Three other hikers were also there (Josaphine, Bruce, and Dana) and we join them for dinner. By this time it was already 8 o’clock. After dinner Phil picked us up and brought us back to our wonderful B&B.  It is absolutely beautiful place overlooking the bay that we have been walking along this evening.

Now that I am home, I uploaded the photos into this post.

Here are some of the other photos.