Cliffs of Moher

Where it sits. The Cliffs of Moher run for about fourteen kilometres along the Atlantic edge of County Clare, from Hag's Head in the south to the townland of Fisherstreet near Doolin in the north. The wall of rock reaches its greatest height, roughly 214 metres, at Knockardakin just north of O'Brien's Tower; at Hag's Head it drops to about 120 metres. The stone is Namurian shale, siltstone and sandstone laid down around 320 million years ago in the delta of a vast river system, which is why the face reads as a stack of horizontal bands rather than a single block. Below the tower stands Branaunmore, a sixty-seven-metre sea stack that was once part of the cliff line and is now cut off by the swell.

The story behind it. The name comes from a vanished promontory fort, Mothar, that stood near Hag's Head and was demolished during the Napoleonic wars to make room for a signal tower whose stump still marks the southern viewpoint. The round tower on the high ground was built in 1835 by Sir Cornelius O'Brien, a local landlord and member of parliament with a talent for self-promotion, explicitly as a viewing platform for visitors — tourism here is nearly two centuries old. The modern Cliffs of Moher Visitor Experience opened in February 2007, dug into the hillside behind the path with a grassed roof so that nothing new breaks the skyline. The cliffs and the karst country behind them together form the Burren and Cliffs of Moher UNESCO Global Geopark, and the site now draws well over a million and a half people a year, making it one of the busiest attractions in Ireland.

On screen. Two productions fixed these cliffs in the popular imagination. In Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987) they play the Cliffs of Insanity, up which Vizzini's party scrambles with the Man in Black behind them: the towering cliff face seen from the water is Moher, filmed by a small unit from the sea, while the rope-climbing itself was staged on a set in England — the principal cast never stood on the Clare coast. Two decades later, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) used the cliffs for the black rock and heaving sea where Dumbledore and Harry apparate before entering the Horcrux cave; it was the only sequence in that film shot outside the United Kingdom, and the cave itself is a construction, not a real opening in the rock. The cliffs have also carried a long line of music videos, including Westlife's My Love and Maroon 5's Runaway, both of which lean on the same trick: a lone figure, a lot of grey Atlantic, and a horizon with nothing in it.

What you actually see today. From the visitor centre a flagged path runs north and south behind a low wall, with the tower about ten minutes' walk uphill. On a clear day the Aran Islands sit low on the water to the northwest and the Twelve Bens of Connemara rise beyond them; Loop Head closes the view to the south. Between May and July the ledges are crowded with breeding seabirds — guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and fulmars in tens of thousands, with the puffin colony concentrated on the grassy top of Goat Island just north of the tower, best watched with binoculars in the early morning. Ravens and choughs work the updraughts, and peregrines nest on the face. Beneath the cliffs at Aill na Searrach lies Aileen's, a heavy-water reef that has been surfed by tow-in crews since the mid-2000s and produces some of the largest ridable waves in Europe.

Beyond the fence. The Cliff Coastal Walk links Doolin to Hag's Head over roughly twenty kilometres of clifftop, following an older right of way maintained by local landowners; walking it from Doolin southward puts the sun behind you in the afternoon and gives the classic view back along the whole cliff line. The path is unfenced for much of its length, close to a crumbling edge, and it is not a route for wind, wet rock or children on a lead. A calmer alternative is the Doolin ferry, which runs cruises along the base of the cliffs from March to October and shows the scale of the thing far better than the top does.

Getting there and timing. The cliffs are about 70 kilometres from Galway and 75 from Limerick on the R478; parking is included in the timed admission ticket, which is cheaper when reserved online in advance. Coaches dominate between 11am and 4pm from Easter to September, so early morning and the last two hours of daylight are far quieter and the light is better, striking the north-facing wall side-on. The paths near the centre are level and surfaced and usable with a wheelchair, but the ground rises steeply towards O'Brien's Tower and the coastal walk beyond is rough. In strong westerlies the outer viewing platforms are closed, and rightly so.