After Galway we went on a scenic drive around Galway Bay to Clare. The landscape is rocky and beautiful, with the limestone close to the surface. It’s called the Burren. (Maybe, I’m too tired to go look it up.) All the walls between the fields a dry rock walls, rather then the shrubs they have around P’s house. On the drive we passed a man on a motorcycle with a border collie in the sidecar. Awesome.
Here are some of the pics I took on the drive:
Sorry I’ve been out of contact, we’ve been on a road trip. It would have been more fun if I weren’t miserably sick. Stupid cold. Though I will say they have some KILLER cold meds over here. Farm Boy took this great pic of me about an hour after I took my first dose. In it I look stoned out of my mind.
The first place we went was Galway. Galway is a fantastic, it reminds me of Santa Cruz. It sits right on the water, and there are a million cute places to eat as well as fun bars. It was one of the first really warm sunny days, so there were tons of people out. It was also the Rugby World cup, Munster (Irish team) was playing Toulouse (French). We watched the first half of the game , then we went shopping. Okay, I went shopping and poor Farm Boy had to come along.
Beautiful Galway!
Trim Castle is your basic normal castle. LOVED IT! It was big and drafty and the stones green and moldy and the walls were 12 feet thick. Trim castle was the Norman stronghold of er, someone, after the English King ____ sent someone over there to make sure that this other someone the English king had already sent over there didn’t decide to make a kingdom of his own because the original someone married an Irish Princess.
Got that? Yea, me either. I would have taken notes, except we weren’t allowed to. You could take pictures, but not notes. Intriguing.
Point is: it’s a massively cool castle. I’ve never really been able to visualize how a castle worked, but walking through it it made much more sense. Huge chunks of Bound need to be re-written to incorporate this new castle working knowledge. Though I think I’ll leave out the bits about peasants hanging their clothes over the huge vat of human waste so the ammonia and gases would kill the lice, fleas and tics living in your clothes. Ahhh the privileges of fiction.
Trim castle is the one used in Braveheart. One side of the castle was London, the other side York, and all the small children and townspeople in the movie are from trim. The executioner in “London” was one of the school teachers.
This is the coolest place I’ve been to so far. Bective Abbey is this great ruin of a stone Abbey that was the base for the order of, er, something monks. Farm Boy knows but he just left the room. The best part about it is that you can just wander around on your own and climb all over the ruins. The Farm Boy and I had a lot of fun acting like kids climbing and jump and generally making more noise than an Abbey should have.
There was one room on the second floor still intact, but they had gates across the doors so you couldn’t get to it.
To get there you have to tromp through a field of cows, then climb stone steps and go over the wall, rather than through the gate.
Oh yea, there’s a whole lotta romance going on here. There’s also a whole lot of cow poo smell. These balance one another out and prevent the silly American girl from doing something nutty, driven by an overabundance of romance.
Me and my Farm Boy
Last night I got to see a calf being born. It was both gross, and not as bad as I’d thought. The cow had been in labor for too long, so FB’s dad had to “help.” Help involved some sort of winching machine that made the mommy cow (Mama Steak) mooo a lot.
I was standing on the other side of some railing, but it was close enough. When Walter Steak’s head popped out his tongue was sticking out and he looked dead, but once he was all the way out FB’s dad stuck his fingers in Walter’s mouth and he started breathing.
I’ve named him Walter, based on Wendy’s suggestion. “Steak” because… well. that’s what he’s going to be.
Yesterday we went to Dowth, Knowth and Newgrange, three neolithic passage grave sites. Sadly none of my archeology classes covered this part of the world, so I didn’t have much background knowledge, but the up side was that I got to go play tourist. The first one we went to was Dowth. No one is allowed in the passage to this one anymore, though the FB remembers going as a kid. The site itself is no longer really open to the public, though you can get to it, by tromping through a sheep field.
We tromped through the sheep field.
The passage graves sound exactly like what they are, long passageways built into a mound with human remains in there. That is a very simple explanation because realistically 1) The remains may have been ceremonial. 2) The mounds were actually built over the top of the passages and they are completely man-made.
Anyway, Dowth is closed, and it’s rather sad looking because the british stuck some dynamite into it and blew up most of the mound. However, there are beautiful views from the top.
Next is Knowth, also a passage grave, later an iron age settlement and then early Christian village. You can only go a little ways into Knowth, not all the way down the passage, but they have a lot of very beautifully decorated kerbstones.
Last we went to Newgrange, the most famous. Newgrange is the one that has the really beautifully decorated stone in front, with the three interconnected spirals (google trispiral Newgrange if you care). Newgrange is famous because the passage faces south, and on the winter equinox sunlight shines through the passage and illuminates the room at the back. It is the only time there is ever light there.
The ceilings were built by corbeling, basically laying stones on top of one another in a decreasing circle until one stone caps the top. There was no mortar, and the whole thing has stood for 5000 years. Newgrange is 500 year older than the oldest pyramid.
Here it is! Scenery!
These photos were taken from the top of Dowth, one of the neolithic passage graves. The most famous of those is Newgrange. Dowth is not open for tourists, but if you happen to be there with a local (yay FB!) who knows where to park and how to tromp through a sheep field to get to Dowth, you can go.
These pictures are of County Meath, specifically the Boyne Valley.
Well I’m here! After a ten hour flight on Aer Lingus (there was a big shamrock on the tail of the plane) I landed in Dublin. I got through customs and immigration with minimal fuss, and my Farm Boy (FB from here on out) was waiting for me. His family lives about an hour from the Dublin airport. At first, as we drove through the countryside, it looked no different that parts of Nor Cal and Texas that I’d seen, but then we went around a curve and BAM green green green dotted with square white cottages, some with thatched roofs. Padraig’s parent’s house is lovely, with the farmland (cows) out back and to the side. I went on a tour of the farm, which included seeing the baby cows, who will suck on your fingers.
Just before dinner we went to the peat bog, and tromped all over it. Don’t step on the yellow moss stuff, turns out that’s not firm. I sank almost to the knee in the stupid bog.
I’ve attached a picture of the view from the sitting room. That stone house is next to the milking shed. The house belongs to FB’s Great Aunt.
