Sometimes, the best design is no design at all.

The year was 2018 and I was in Dublin for the karate world championships. That was my second time going to Dublin for that competition. The first time was 2016. I’d won silver in forms, silver in team fighting and bronze in individual fighting. In 2017 in Florida I won a silver in team fighting and a gold in individual fighting. This was going to be my last year and I insisted on winning gold again in individual fighting because if you only win once it can be luck. I needed to know it wasn’t. I also wanted to win gold in forms because after being shut out of finals in 2017 I had worked extremely hard on that kata. I got silver in forms again but I did win my second world championship in a row. I gave my spot on the fighting team to someone who’d never gotten any medals at worlds and coached the Canadian women to silver.

I’d flown with a friend and insisted on renting a car because I wanted to see more of the country in-between all the karateing. In 2016 I’d visited Galway. In 2018 I was planning to visit Northern Ireland (I’ll tell you later about Giant’s Causeway) and, since there was a half-day’s worth of freedom in the schedule, I zipped out west to the Cliffs of Moher. (I wrote a short story loosely based on that drive, for a California magazine that has since gone belly-up; here it is republished.)

Anyway, the Cliffs, wow.

The Cliffs take their name from a ruined promontory fort ‘Mothar’ – which was demolished during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, to make room for a signal tower at Hag’s Head. The word ‘Mothar’in old Gaelic means ‘the ruin of a fort’.

They are part of the rugged Clare coast of Ireland and run about 14 kilometres long. They reach heights of over 700 feet, and the most hilarious feature of the place is the absence of guardrails. It’s not the best location suddenly to discover you have vertigo.

Per Wikipedia:

The cliffs consist mainly of beds of Namurian shale and sandstone, and the oldest rocks are at the bottom of the cliffs. During the time of their formation between 313 and 326 million years ago, a river dumped sand, silt and clay into an ancient marine basin. Over millions of years, the sediments collecting at the mouth of this ancient delta were compacted and lithified into the sedimentary strata preserved in the now-exposed cliffs. The area is considered a geologic laboratory that preserves a record of deltaic deposition in deep water. Individual strata vary in thickness from just a few centimetres to several metres, each representing a specific depositional event in the history of the delta.

The day I went the sky was blue and clear and I swear by squinting I could almost see Newfoundland. I waved, just in case it could see me, too. Oh, and it was fucking freezing with a wind so cold it cut through to the bone.

There are paths — including some that are set back from the edge for the people who enjoy waking up alive — a lovely old tower you can climb because 700 feet above sea level isn’t high enough, and a cool place to grab a bite and get lost in the surrounding poetry.

The visitor centre slash gift shop slash restaurant slash loo is built right into the side of the hill, kind of like a Hobbit house but more quaint.

It’s an experience like no other, in great part because only the minimum was done by humans, in order to let the magnificent natural beauty do all the talking.

Lors de ma deuxième visite à Dublin, pour les championnats de monde de karate de 2018, j’ai fait une virée vers l’ouest pour aller perdre la moitié de mon souffle aux falaises Moher.

C’était tellement mémorable comme road-trip que j’ai écrit une nouvelle à ce sujet.

Ce que j’ai particulièrement apprécié du lieu, ce qui le rend unique, en fait, c’est qu’on n’a pratiquement rien fait pour l’aménager. Même pas de barrières de sécurité. Si vous êtes trop nono pour vous pitcher 700 pieds plus bas, c’est votre problème. Un peu darwinien comme approche, mais bon. Le centre d’interprétation est enfoui dans la montagne comme la maison de Bilbo Baggins, ce qui est chouette.

Bref, à Moher, on laisse la nature — époustouflante — faire la job. Et ça fonctionne. Comme quoi il faut parfois ne rien faire pour tout faire.