A Day in the Country

I was wanting to see some Ireland countryside, so I bit the bullet and bought a ticket for a bus tour to Glendalough and Kilkenny.  I kind of dread tours-- I don't like sightseeing with a mass of people, I detest the canned theatrical hype of most tour guides, and I don't like not being able to go off the beaten path.  I chose this particular tour because it promised that at each stop, we would be left to our own devices for a length of time.

The bus came promptly at 8:30 A.M.  I scored a seat behind the tour guide, a charming good-looker resembling the actor Michael Vartan, who kept the commentary to just-the-right-amount:  some interesting facts, but lots of silences in between.

Our first stop was Glendalough, a monastic site from 400 until 1398 (when the British plundered it-- are you noticing a theme in Irish history?)  There are ruins of the community who lived there and a beautiful cemetery.  There are also two glacial lakes.  We were dropped off at the site and given 90 minutes to explore.  It was lush and green and ancient and beautiful.  I can understand why people here believed in brownies, fairies, and leprechauns.  You can imagine them living in this forest.  I think I'll let the pictures tell the story.

The cemetery at Glendalough

A glacial lake

Wicklow Gap in the Wicklow Mountains

Heather

From there we went to Kilkenny, which has a castle built upon Norman ruins.   The castle was refurbished twice in its history, the last during the Victorian era, but was then left to ruin.  The family finally gave it to the state, who have restored it down to exact replicas of the wallpaper.  I wish I could show you photos of the inside, but we weren't allowed to take photos.  And, to continue the theme, one of the castle's walls was destroyed by Cromwell, who attacked the city and stabled his horses in the Catholic Cathedral.  Here are the gardens, however:

As we drove back our guide, Andrew, spoke with all of us to see if we enjoyed our trip. I talked with him about the excellent play I saw at the Abbey Theater last night, which was about a family who for generations was Catholic aristocracy (in a country where the real wealth and power was with the Protestants, who supported the British) but after several generations, the house and land was going to ruin.  I remarked that I wondered what it does to a people's culture to be constantly occupied by invading forces:  first the Vikings, then the Normans, and last, the British.  Andrew told me that for anyone under 40, "the troubles" are ancient history.  They don't care-- it happened before they were born.  I'm amazed that the recent truly terrifying terrorist history could be erased in two generations-- just like that.

After returning to Dublin, I had an excellent Italian meal of a complexly spiced gazpacho and home-made pasta with a spicy sausage, tomato, and red pepper sauce.  As I walked back to my hotel, the bells in Christchurch cathedral began playing, and played for an hour.  Knowing from my tour's firsthand experience how one has to literally hang on the bell pull and resist its upward movement to make the bell ring, it seems physically impossible for people to ring them for an hour.  I also learned that because the tower has a large number of bells, innumerable combinations of bell playing can be created.  To do so, the bell ringers of Christchurch are mostly physicists, who use mathematical equations to work out the bell sequences.  We saw one such sequence on a white board in the belfry.  Who knew?

It's time for me to do my nightly ritual, which includes showering off the day's sweat and grime, rinsing my sweat-soaked clothing in the sink and hanging it on a portable clothesline to dry, and going down to the bar to ask for a bag of ice to ice my knee.  Tomorrow I hope to go to the shore and hike, eat seafood, and maybe take a boat trip out on the water.