The Cliffs of Moher are the Atlantic edge of Ireland: a wall of dark rock fourteen kilometres long and up to 214 metres high on the coast of County Clare, walked along the top. The wind comes off the ocean with nothing to break it, hard enough to knock you off balance, and the surf booms up from the rocks below. The wall is banded from top to bottom, and the bands are a record. Each cycle of mudstone, siltstone and sandstone marks a sea that flooded a river delta and then pulled back again. The flagstone under your boots is the same rock, and it carries burrows and trails pressed into that mud by soft-bodied animals — for most of them the only record left.
The paved, walled path takes you about a kilometre north from the visitor centre to O'Brien's Tower. Cornelius O'Brien put it up in 1835, a landlord who thought visitors worth encouraging and built them somewhere to stand. From the battlements the coast runs south to Hag's Head, and on a clear day the Aran Islands show out in the bay. The longer routes along the edge to Doolin and Hag's Head are not always open: sections close for months as the cliff erodes under them. From late spring the ledges fill. Up to thirty thousand pairs of seabirds crowd the rock. On Goat Island, the grassy stack below the first platform, you can pick out the largest mainland puffin colony in Ireland, orange bills among thousands of guillemots and razorbills. The wall faces due west, so the sun goes down into open ocean and the layered rock burns orange-red for a few minutes before the whole coast drops into shadow. That flat-bedded stone was quarried here as Liscannor slab and laid as paving far beyond Ireland, and many of those slabs still carry the ripple marks of the sea floor.