Ladies View
Watercolour and crayon
©2017 Charlene Brown
One of the stops on our Irish RailTour was
Killarney, and from there we were taken by bus on the very winding, sometimes
precipitous Ring of Kerry.
A highlight was the Ladies View of the Killarney Lakes – so named because Queen Victoria, while dedicating or inaugurating something during an official visit, gave her ladies-in-waiting the day off and sent them on an excursion. They spotted this lovely vista and insisted that the Queen herself have a look at it the next day.
In keeping with this backstory and assuming Queen Victoria was always accompanied by a kilted bagpiper, we were ‘piped’ to the lookout point. Our piper was not kilted, but decked out in industrial-strength raingear known as an Inverness Cape, leaning stoically into the wind. I’ve exaggerated how much of the ladies view you could see that day – everything but the piper was actually kind of blurry.
