After our visit to Donegal and the castle earlier in the morning, we decided to visit Marble Arch Caves. Marble Arch Caves are show caves located southeast from Donegal. We drove in this direction and also made a stop at Belleek Pottery on the way.
We stopped off at Belleek Pottery to visit the visitor's centre. There's also a museum on site, and if we had had more time, we would have done a tour. We went to the large shop and admired some of the pieces that could be seen in the main area. The porcelain looks so fragile and also so beautiful, and the pieces that are coloured are hand-painted. I absolutely loved the cornflower piece, which I got a detail of below.
The pottery looks beautiful, and the below building is their museum and visitor's centre with the shop.
We got a little lost trying to locate the visitor centre, and the phone reception was not great. We eventually arrived, but we just missed the tour by a couple of minutes and had to wait for the next one to begin. Marble Arch Caves had one signpost but we struggled to find another one along the way and probably ended up in a detour somewhere.
Marble Arch Caves are located in Culicagh Mountain and were formed from limestone that was created 330 million years ago when the land of Ireland was near the equator and the land covered in tropical seas. The dying organisms fell to the bottom of the sea and formed the limestone.
We had a quick bite to eat at the visitor's centre. When it was time for our tour to begin, we were led out the back and followed a little trail down to the caves. The first part of the journey was by boat in the caves, across an underground river.
The journey by boat took ten minutes. We were loaded into several motorised boats and glided through the caves. Note that the boats do not run if the water levels are too high, but the caves can still be accessed.
After we reached the other side, we continued our tour with the guide. Overall, the tour in the caves takes about seventy-five minutes, and it's a pretty gentle walking tour. We were told the history of the caves. The cave system is one of the largest and its caves were found and explored in the early 1900s.
We were shown different rock formations (stalagtites and stalagmites) and told about them. However, some of these had to be repaired as vandals broke into the cave system before it was due to open and destroyed many of the formations.
We were shown the different colours of the rock formations by the types of chemicals in the stones, and we were shown a waterfall at the end of the journey with water cascading down the cave walls.
After our cave visit, we headed south to Galway. Not far away from the caves and on the main road, we were surrounded by beautiful mountain scenery that we stopped and got photographs of.
Have you been to Marble Arch Caves in Ireland?
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