”The weather,” says our guide Liz Warner, “is the main topic of conversation here in Ireland.” Indeed, only that morning, in The Irish Times , there is a headline that reads: “Forty shades of green meets 50 shades of grey – a typical Irish summer”. This does not bode well for our Icons of Ireland coach tour but, apart from one slightly drizzly afternoon wandering around a horse stud and Japanese garden in Kildare, we are blessed with near-perfect weather.
Forty shades of green meets one shade of blue sky. Dublin at night – and the craic is mighty. Credit: iStock And why not? Ireland has more saints than you can poke a stick at – from Abban of Corbmaic to seventh century Wasnulf – so the occasional tiny miracle is to be welcomed, so it is.
We first meet Warner when we take our seats in Dublin’s elegant three-star Belvedere hotel, and she takes us through what’s going to be happening on the tour. From Dublin we’ll head to Kilkenny, Cobh (pronounced “cove”), Cork, the Cliffs of Moher, and Galway before landing back to Dublin full to the gills with Guinness and Irish stew (though that might just be me). Warner, who is Cobh born and bred, proves to be an effervescent and entertaining guide, with an encyclopedic knowledge of her home country, a wicked sense of humour, and a beautiful Celtic lilt to her voice that makes even the most prosaic sentence sound like poetry.
“We’ll be grand,” she says. “It’ll be grand. That’s our favourite word he.
