Click a point to jump to its film.
In 1964 a German manufacturer nearly bought the Cliffs of Moher. Eberhard Kemper wanted 65 acres at Lislorkan North, half a mile of cliff frontage with the ruined tower standing in it. Two cousins owned the ground, Danny and Kathleen Considine, in plots split so that a buyer needed both. Kathleen was willing. Danny was not; land counted with him and money did not, in the account the county manager's daughter later published in the Irish Times.
Word reached the county manager, Joe Boland, through the chairman of Bord Fáilte. He bought the piece that would leave the rest worthless to a developer: two acres and twenty-five perches around O'Brien's Tower, the ground the view is seen from.
Look down while you stand on it. The paving at the visitor centre is Liscannor flagstone, cut from the same beds as the cliff face and covered in squiggles, the burrows and feeding trails of animals that lived in a delta here 320 million years ago. Nobody has identified the animal. Those markings are why the stone was quarried, by an industry that closed with the First World War.
Harry and Dumbledore row into a sea cave in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; the operator points at one visible from the central platform, looking south. The Princess Bride got its Cliffs of Insanity here in establishing shots, with the climbing done at Shepperton. Peter Pan & Wendy came for Neverland, Westlife and Sonohra for videos on the top. Waveriders turned the camera the other way, onto Aill na Searrach, the wave at the foot of the wall that Easkey Britton rode in 2007.
Kemper wanted sixty-five acres and got none. Clare County Council has 34.6 of them now, and they carry the paths, the tower and the platform. The rest of the cliff runs on through other people's fields, and the Considines still farm at Lislorkan North.