Doolin Cave

Well, still no photos. I found an internet cafe, but naturally the stupid computer doesn't recognize my camera. So I'll just quickly describe what I did this morning.
I went to the local cave, Doolin Cave. This one, unlike the Dunmore caves, is privately owned, as the cost of the ticket would suggest. It cost three times as much as Dunmore. And to be honest, I think I got a third of the value out of it. The one thing this cave can boast is supposedly the largest free-hanging stalactite accessible to the ublic in the world. And it is fairly impressive. Now, I don't have any problems with making this post without any photos because I didn't take any photos. I don't like taking photos in caves for a number of reasons. Firstly, with my little automatic camera, the flash tends to wash everything out and the photos look terrible. When photos are concerned I much prefer quality over quantity. In fact, after any outing I usually delete over half the photos I took. If there's one thing I can't stand it's being shown somebody's holiday snaps, and each photo is taken five times from different, yet equally bad angles. It's a tedium I wouldn't wish on anyone.
The other reason why I don't like to take pictures in caves is because they never capture the 'feeling' of the cave. A cave, for me, is something you have t experience as a whole, not in little snapshots. It doesn't do justice to it. It's like taking a picture of a steaming hot bath. The bath might have been fantastic, but who cares about the picture? That being said, you will have noticed I took a handful of shots at Dunmore, such as the bat skeleton. This I would liken to taking a picture of the bathtub's feet because of their interesting, victorian design.
Besides, the cave wasn't that great anyway, as I said. Horribly developed I would say. It was originally discovered in the 1950s by a couple of students from england, surveying caves in the area. They found a tiny, thin underground passage through which they crawled for two hours to arrive at the chamber that houses the stalactite. This passageway has in the last few years been enlarged to accomodate visitors, and has more of the feeling of a mine tour. And not even a good mine tour. A good mine tour is of a mine with pedigree and history. This one is only a handful of years old and serves just to get you to the chamber. The chamber itself is then dominated by a massive, blocky concrete staircase winding down to the bottom, and the whole thing is garishly lit by glaring spotlights. Spotlights in a cave should be used tastefully and sparingly, or else they ruin the soul of it. This cave felt like a broadway production.
There is a second chamber too, but this one is just as developed and doesn't even boast any impressive formations - just one boring fuzzy looking thing that's apparently quite rare. And the final thing I want to mention is the shaft that leads to the 'mine'. This one is the worst of all. It's a wide concrete tube with a metal staircase, and the whole thing looks like it could have come out of the movie Total Recall.
All in all, it was a fairly disappointing cave. But that said, I think I was going in expecting little and it may have influenced my experience. Still, if you see one cave in Ireland, there are better ones than this.