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[OC] Slieve League Cliffs, Ireland
(i.imgur.com)
Here is another one of my pictures from my trip to Ireland last week. This is a shot of the Slieve League Cliffs in county Ulster. It is a region of Ireland located in the very north-west corner of the island. Apparently on the day I was there and took this picture someone unfortunately went missing on the cliffs, suspected that he fell off or got pushed off.
I just mean the ridge that runs along the crest of those hills at the Slieve League, where you've got pretty fair drops on both sides of a rather narrow "path", eventually verging on sheer on the seaward side. A couple of times, after I hopped from one rock to another, even 20-something me thought, "Jeez that was pretty stupid." Then, when you're actually at the cliffs, there was no real infrastructure of any kind, and definitely no railings. In the early 2000s at least, it was still a fairly wild sort of place.
Wow, sounds great! Yeah when I walked up last week there still weren't any railings haha and near the top there's a little car park where the busses drop people off (I didn't take the bus I walked up) and there's a few merchants up there selling clothes and ice cream and stuff.
Sounds like it's only changed a little. Not sure the roads or the car park could have handled a full-size coach/tourbus back then, and I don't recall any vendors, but I doubt it will ever be fully commercialized, and certainly not while Brexit makes it a pain to get over from NI. It's just too remote, and "good enough" cliffs are available elsewhere.
I was backpacking though the British Isles between college/university and law school, stayed at a little hostel nestled in the valley, and hiked up through the sheep shit to then walk down into the main viewing area. It was probably only a couple of hundred yards where I was doing anything actually dangerous, but while very fun, it was also rather dumb.