Cliffs of Moher

At more than two hundred metres in height, the Cliffs of Moher, comprising layers of flagstone and shale facing into the Atlantic, is an impressive attraction when you’re at the top. Crowning the cliffs is a Victorian structure called O’Brien’s Tower, from which the site has been used to view the area since the 1830s.

O’Brien’s Tower is named after a local Member of Parliament, Sir Cornelius O’Brien, who in the 1830s and 1840s was said to have built practically everything in County Clare at the time, with the exception of the cliffs themselves. The O’Brien clan can be traced back to Brien Boru and before that to early Christian Ireland. The clan O’Brien still retains a leader as the head of the house, and at various times in the family history, the O’Briens have been either pro or anti-British, and either Protestant or Catholic.

At any rate, Cornelius O’Brien served as a member of parliament at Westminster in London, representing Clare. An early advocate for tourism, he saw the value in marketing the Cliffs of Moher as a spot for sightseers.

If you don’t want to use the tower, unanticipated gusts of wind make it less dangerous for visitors to simply crawl on all fours or on one’s belly in order to peer over the edge, than to simply stand at the height and look down on the Atlantic below.

More sophisticated than O’Brien’s Tower is the new interpretive centre, Atlantic Edge, also located at the Cliffs. The centre houses this interactive experience underground – after entering via a viewing ramp providing access to the main dome shaped area, the domed cave itself is then revealed, where exhibits and images are displayed.

There are four themes for the exhibit: Nature, Man, Rock and Nature.

Visitors are led post-exhibit via a tunnel to give the visitor a taste of the caves that the area also has in abundance. Through the tunnel, they arrive at a theatre where a virtual reality adventure takes place. The Atlantic Edge exhibition wraps up half an hour before the visitor’s centre’s closing time, so if you reach the site late in the day, you can visit the centre to see if the exhibit is still running immediately, just in case you’re disappointed.

If that all seems a little bit gimmicky, the Cliffs of Moher stretch for some eight kilometres along the coastline, so they are more than just a tourist resort. A Refuge for Fauna since 1988 and a Special Protection Area for Birds (SPA) under the EU Birds’ Directive since 1989, the Cliffs are the chosen residence of one of the largest colonies of nesting seabirds in Ireland. The area around the cliffs has grasslands and heath that are worthy of special attention, given the importance that conservationists and bird lovers give the area. Indeed, the special designation attributed to the site comprises an area of some 200 hectares.

The Cliffs of Moher have reached a shortlist for the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. “New7Wonders of Nature” is an endeavour to bring such a list – which has never been definitively compiled – up to date. The Cliffs are now on a list of nearly thirty that includes the Amazon Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.