On the road again

Ireland is a compact country. If you google (the term now replacing ‘look up’) distances in Ireland from place to place, you will see that it’s not very far to go from, say Galway to Dublin: 200 kilometres – and that’s almost the full width of the country.
But Irish Roads, like many of other aspects of this country, are not quite what they seem.
Roads outside of motorways are all single-lane two-way with no overtaking lanes (that’s N roads and R roads). They are also often very narrow.
The Irish, I have deduced, are very sensitive about “their land” (for good reason). They like to mark out boundaries very clearly and as my daughter observed yesterday, “There are more walls in Ireland than sheep.”
The consequence of all this clarity is that on most of the roads, there is no verge – no spare space to pull over – not a scrap of it. In fact, there will usually be a wall or a high hedge or some trees along both sides of the road – so not only can you not pull over, but often you can’t see very far ahead. The result? Many blind corners.
So, when it says on the map that it’s just 40 kilometres to the next castle, that’s not the Australian version of driving.
You would be very lucky to sit on 70 for most of the trip. Oh, and did I mention that no towns are bypassed. Speed limit in towns? 50ks.
Speed limit outside of towns – mostly 100ks! This can be translated in two ways (Apply Irish accent):
“Go on – we dare you!” or “Well, if you really must go 100, then alright then, we’ll let you. But we’d like to see how you get along with that. It’s madness altogether.”
PS: Incidentally, they still sell that product “I can’t believe it’s not butter” here. Can you believe that?