We’re beginning here on Inishmore.
At eight miles long and two miles wide,
it’s the largest of the three Aran Islands.
It’s also the most populated, interesting and visited.
Inishmore’s main attraction
is the 2,000-year-old fortress of Dun Aengus,
which hangs precariously on the edge of a cliff
300 feet above the Atlantic.
The concentric walls of this mysterious Celtic fort
are 13 feet thick and 10 feet high.
As an added defense, effective even today,
the fort is ringed with a commotion of spiky stones
called Frisian soldiers.
Sticking up like lances,
they’re named after ancient soldiers
who used a wall of spears to stop a charging cavalry.
Little by little, as the cliff erodes,
the walls of this circular fort fall into the sea below.
Dun Aengus can be mobbed by day-trippers.
But since we spent the night, we’re here early,
and the place is all ours.
I make a point to be all alone here,
where the crashing waves below seem to say,
"you’ve come to the very edge of Europe."
The place to commune with the ancient soul of Ireland
is in its lush countryside.
The peaceful Boyne River Valley,
just an hour’s drive north of Dublin,
offers a world-class concentration
of historical and spiritual sites.
In one day, you can see the capital of ancient Irish kings,
some of Ireland’s finest high crosses,
crawl through burial mounds older than the pyramids
and be back in Dublin in time for dinner and a pub crawl.
And that’s precisely our plan.
The Hill of Tara was the most important center of political
and religious power in pre-Christian Ireland.
This was the seat of the high kings of Celtic Ireland.
And this is the place where you find the soul of Ireland,
here on this Hill of Tara.
Local guide Jean Thornton is giving us a sample
of Tara’s prehistoric, medieval and modern history.
Rick: So for 5,000 years people have come here?
Jean: People have come to Tara
and indeed you can see they’re still coming today.
We know the Stone Age people were here.
We know the Bronze Age people were here.
We know the Iron Age people were here.
This area was a very sacred place
where ceremony and ritual took place.
Now, you know, St. Patrick is our patron saint
and the shamrock is a symbol of Ireland.
We are told that it all began here on this Hill of Tara.
Now, in AD 432, Ireland was a pagan country.
Now, he came here to this Hill of Tara
to ask the pagan king’s permission
to spread Christianity.
Now, this is what St. Patrick used
to explain Christianity to the High King.
He used this as a symbol.
There are three leaves and one stem
on this little piece of shamrock.
The father, the son, and the holy spirit.
And that is how he explained the trinity,
the concept of Christianity, to this pagan king.
The symbolic importance of Tara continued
into Ireland’s modern history.
In 1843,
Daniel O’Connell, the great champion of Irish liberty,
gathered several hundred thousand people here.
Peacefully, they demanded Irish home rule.
This ruined monastery, Monasterboice,
is notable for its round tower,
a standard feature in ireland’s early Christian churches,
and its ornately carved high crosses.
The cross of Muiredach,
named after an abbot who ran this place around the year 900,
is considered the finest high cross in all Ireland.
These crosses were illustrated with bible stories
carved into the sandstone.
Originally, they were brightly painted.
Imagine, a thousand years ago, priests used these
as visual aids as they taught the people.
Tim Collins, Dingle’s retired police chief,
is an amateur archaeologist
who takes my tour groups around when they’re in town.
Today his group is really small, just me and Andy.
On this trip around the peninsula,
Andy is learning some history the way I like to,
from a local.
Dingle peninsula is like an open-air museum.
It’s dotted with more than 2,000 monuments
dating back to 4000 BC.
Some of Ireland’s ancient and complex history
can be sorted out by visiting these sites.
Now, this is actually known as Dunbeg Promontory Fort.
It’s one of about 2,200 archaeological monuments
we have on the Dingle Peninsula.
This site was built by the early settlers, about 500 BC.
That is the date for it.
It has been excavated about 25 years ago
because half of it has actually fallen into the sea
due to coastal erosion.
I suppose there’s no part of Ireland
that has got so many archaeological monuments intact
as you have got in the Dingle Peninsula.
And probably that’s due to the fact that this area
has never been industrialized, thankfully so far.
This remote peninsula was also busy
during early Christian times.
The Gallarus Oratory was a church
built without mortar about 1,200 years ago.
Shaped like an upturned boat, its finely-fitted walls,
stone without mortar, still keep out the rain.
In the depth of the dark ages,
monks fled the chaos of continental Europe.
They sailed to the far fringes of the known world,
settling in places like this, Dingle Peninsula.
Living in monastic communities of stone igloo-type huts,
they kept literacy alive for Western civilization.
In fact, Charlemagne, who ruled much of Europe in the year 800,
imported monks from Ireland to be his scribes.
Tim: This was the typical layout
of these early Christian monasteries,
several stone-type igloos and a church within a fortified wall.
The inner wall divided the community into two sections,
one for work and one for worship.
This monument now actually is a thousand years older
than what we have been already looking at.
It’s a slab cross erected by the Celts about 500 years BC,
red sandstone, and they decorated this stone
with these Celtic motifs or these concentric circles
which run through the front of the stone
and that remain out of the sixth century AD.
When the Christians came and Christianized the cross
by superimposing this Greek cross
on the upper part of the old Celtic monument.
Thus explains the two traditions on the one slab cross,
the Celtic and the Christian.
When the English came in the 12th century,
they replaced the old monastic settlements,
like the one we just saw, with their own churches
in an attempt to centralize their control.
During that era, this ruined church
was the center of worship for the peninsula.
And here on Dingle peninsula,
the soil itself reveals the struggles of the Irish people.
Now, in prehistory, the soil here was worthless, very barren.
This soil here we’re looking at
was actually made by the hard work and endeavors
of the peasants that actually had to reclaim this barren land
by going to the beach and drawing up seaweed and sand
to augment the very barren soil that was there
to grow their potatoes and their crops.
So there’s seaweed and sand?
Seaweed and sand mixture and some peat,
which has developed into a clay over the centuries.
Patch by patch, they created fertile fields for potatoes,
climbing ever higher up the hillside.
In 1845, they planted.
But a blight swept across Ireland and nothing grew.
The potatoes rotted in the ground.
For the next four years, Ireland starved.
The village of Dunquin, with its many abandoned homes,
is a reminder that Ireland’s population
was decimated by the Great Potato Famine.
In Ireland, you drive on the left.
On narrow roads like these, take your time.
Everybody works together in a scenic do-si-do
up and over the mountain.
With the help of a good map,
I often take the slow, more memorable route.
The dramatic Connor Pass leads to the scenic
southwest tip of Ireland, Dingle Peninsula.
Over 100 inches of rain a year
give this area its famous 40 shades of green.
Dingle peninsula offers an ideal mix
of far-and-away beauty,
archaeological wonders and desolate walks or bike rides,
all within convenient reach of its main town.
My Irish dreams have long been set here
on this sparse but lushly carpeted peninsula.
The people of Dingle are close to the land.
When I asked a local if he was born here,
he thought for a second and said,
"No, it was about six miles down the road."
When I asked if he had lived here all his life,
he said, "Not yet."
Dingle is so traditionally Irish
because it’s another Gaeltacht,
a region where the Irish culture survives,
subsidized by the government.
While English is always there, the signs, menus and songs
often come in Irish, or Gaelic, first.
Teenagers from Ireland’s big cities
come here for summer camp, filling old-time school rooms
to learn the traditional language and Irish ways.
[ Speaking in Irish ]
And here, Irish songs are sung in Irish.
[ Singing in Irish ]
And old churches do double duty as concert halls
where those enthusiastic about traditional music
share their art.
♪♪
[ Applause ]
The town of Dingle is the perfect home base
for peninsula explorations.
It’s just large enough to have all the necessary
tourist services and a steady beat of Irish folk music.
Although a popular tourist destination,
Dingle still has a relaxed feel.
This is a place where the fish and the farm still matter.
A faint whiff of burning peat fills its streets.
Tractor tracks dirty the main drag.
And 40 fishing boats still sail from its harbor.