Afternoon in Adare, Ireland: Our First Castle!

Travel date: June 19, 2019

One of the things I miss about RV-less road trips is being able to stop easily to see things along the way. We’ve done some of this with the trailer, but between finding parking and worrying about leaving the dogs, it just doesn’t happen all that often. So we made stopping to see things on our driving days in Ireland, dogless and trailerless, a priority.

Adare was our pick for the drive between Dublin (we picked up our rental cars at the airport the morning we were leaving) and Killarney. It was about halfway and looked easy to get to, we could take a tour of the castle ruins there, and there were plenty of restaurants to pick from for a lunch stop.

Adare was our first introduction to charming and quaint Irish towns. Every year Ireland host a Tidy Towns Contest, and I understand that people take it pretty seriously. Judging from Adare’s prominently displayed plaque announcing its 1976 victory, I hear correctly:

1976 was a long time ago, but Adare still appeared pretty tidy to us.

We were a bit nervous about parking, and not completely without justification. Parking in Ireland is nearly always at least slightly worrisome, in my experience. Well, maybe not nearly always, but often. Anyway, there is a fairly large public parking lot next to the Adare Heritage Center, and we managed to find parking here, but only after circling around a bit. This was on a weekday in mid-June, around midday.

Our first order of business was eating lunch. We ended up at Aunty Lena’s, which offered good food and–bonus!–a courthouse museum upstairs. The courthouse can be rented for private events, or you can just check it out after you eat and learn a little about Adare’s history:

We’d gotten our ticket for a castle tour before lunch (the castle can only be seen on a guided tour), and we still had some time before it started, so we checked out the Town Park, right across from the Heritage Center and Aunty Lena’s. It’s a lovely park, but when the kids wandered into this more natural area, Gus had a run in with something or other and emerged with a painful rash:

So Dave got to pay his first visit to an Irish pharmacy to try to find something to put on it. There was no Benadryl, but he found something or other that worked.

And then we headed back to the Heritage Center, where we had time to check out the free exhibit about the history of the area before our tour. I was surprised/impressed by how extensive it was. And there are tables in there, so you can bring food from the onsite restaurant in there and eat amongst the friars and whatnot:

And then it was time for our castle tour! Tickets are 10 euros for adults or 22.50 for a family ticket, good for 2 adults and up to 5 kids under 18. We boarded the shuttle bus for the short ride to the castle, and our tour guide told us all about the area on the way over.

I guess this wasn’t really our very first castle in Ireland, since we’d hung out at Dublin Castle a bit. But we hadn’t gone inside there, and Dublin Castle isn’t especially….castle-y anyway. Desmond Castle in Adare dates to the 13th century, and it was an excellent introduction to checking out ruins–something there is much opportunity to do in Ireland. It’s the only place we had a ruins tour guide, unless I’m forgetting something, which is another reason it was a good pick: after someone explains murder holes to you once, you can spot them on your own easily at other castles!

At the end, our guide offered to take pictures for people and, as you may know, my rule about that is to always say yes:

And then back at the Heritage Center, we finished up with some ice cream for the road. You can also get a whole meal there or check out the gift shops they have.

All in all, it was exactly what we were looking for in a middle of the day stop!

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