Laetitia decided to take her group to Renvyle, a community in the Connemara district of County Galway. It is an area of rugged hills and beautiful scenery, with outcroppings of Connemara Green marble that can be seen along some of the hiking trails. The group spent most of the day in Connemara National Park, doing a mountain hike first and then hiking through forest and bog-land.

Before going to a pub for dinner, they did a walkabout in Renvyle and saw something most in the group had never seen before: hair done up in a beehive. Laetitia remembered seeing Audrey Hepburn wearing a tasteful beehive in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but this woman looked like she belonged in a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon. Of course, Audrey Hepburn had been young when she did that film, and her hair had been neatly coiffed by the makeup team. On the other hand, this woman was old and had literally allowed her bouffant to go to seed.

At the pub, the bartender had the story. When Colleen Moore was a young woman in the 1960s, she lived in Chicago and worked in a diner where the beehive was all the rage. She never married, and when she retired she moved to Ireland, where her family had come from originally. She adopted the hairstyle as a way of recapturing her youth. He said, “She’s very proud of it and even boasts about it, but she doesn’t take care of it, and it isn’t very popular with her Irish neighbors.” The story provided the limerick of the day.

“‘Tis the tres haute coiffure of Renvyle”
Said Miss Moore of her beehive hairstyle
‘Til unwashed it grew weeds
Sprung from wet bird-dropped seeds
And it soon was a thing to revile.