Ireland 2008, Part 2

Ireland 2008, Part 2

After we left the hostel in the buren, we drove to the costal town of Galway. We passed through Kinvarna on the way, and these four pictures are of that Kinvarna.

It was a really old town, so there were lots of historically significant landmarks. For instance, the fourth picture in the second row shows the building owned by the man who inspired the term "lynching." We also saw the old church and a river through the middle of town that was raging, probably because of the rainfall.

We picked up some lunch from the grocery store and walked under the Spanish Arch. This was one of four that was built by the Spaniards in return for some favor back about 500 years ago. There is also a monument that says that Christopher Columbus first found evidence of a world east of Europe when he was visiting this site.

The big pile of scrap metal was by the marina, which was also by the closes place that we could find parking in. While in Ireland we were almost never able to find free parking, and there were times when we couldn't find a spot even if we were willing to pay.

We found a nice Italian place to eat in the next town over, once again demonstrating our appreciation for global culture.

From there we drove directly across the country on the expressway to Dublin. We didn't fly out for another 2 days, but we had found inexpensive lodging in the town of Swords, just north of the airport. That would serve as a good base camp for our exploration of the archaeological sites to the north of Dublin.

After we checked into the Travelodge, we drove into town to get some food. They've made a park out of the old castle, so we played around there.

We checked out all of the restaurants and then decided on Chinese. It was much more formal than the Chinese places we are used to at home, and the food was good.

The girls wanted to have some Irish beer, so we stopped by a little pub. I sat with them for a while but as it started to seem a little bit old I walked around to take some pictures of the motorcycles and clouds.

The next morning we drove an hour or so up to the Boyne River Visitor Center. From there we were able to get tickets and tours of Newgrange and Knowth, two of the many ancient mounds in the area. In the visitor center we learned that the sites were older than the pyramids, and were evidence of extremely primitive people. However primitive they might have been, they still had a pretty cool motorcycle parking sign.

The river was probably part of what attracted these people to the area. It's hard to know, because there isn't much documented history about the details. What's clear is that the mounds were surrounded by huge delicately carved stones that geologist say came from some distance away. Historians think that they moved these huge stones before the invention of the wheel and axle, making it even more impressive. Inside of the mound there is a tunnel that is carefully aligned to allow sunlight to enter on the solstice. In the past 7000 years there have been lots of other people who have used the various sites, often without even realizing that the tunnels were underneath. About 1500 years ago the Christians built a castle on top of this one and dug a moat around it.

Nobody knows why he white stones are there, but they do know that they do not naturally occur close by. Someone liked them enough to transport them quite a distance, also before the availability of the wheel and axle.

With our tour of the first site over, we took a short bus over to the second one. We were able to go inside of the second one to see the tunnel and the corballed roof that made up the chamber at the end. Seeing these ancient sites was my second favorite part of our around the world adventure, behind the Amy and Peter portion of Germany, especially the water slides.

We returned to the visitor center and had a few bowls of hot soup.

They wouldn't let us take pictures inside of the real tunnel, but they had this replica in the visitor center that we were able to touch and photograph instead. This first picture below is the view looking up at the ceiling in the chamber at the end of the tunnel. You can see how the corballed ceiling is constructed. They take rocks and pile them in increasingly smaller diameters to make sort of a beehive shape, then put one final stone on the top. We saw houses that were made this way on the Dingle Peninsula, but I didn't take any pictures of them. The second picture is directions to Slaine, which was our next stop.

The ruins in the hill of Slaine were much like the other ruins we had seen with one major exception. Nobody seemed to care about exposure with these, so cows were able to graze right up next to the walls, and we were able to climb around on them and explore. The ruins are of Slaine Abbey, which was a monestary built around 1512.

You can read all about the significance of Slaine in the first picture below. St Patrick was there to light a fire on Easter back in 433 or so, and that made some folks mad. It turned out OK in the end and then they established the first version of the monestary.

Before we took the rental car back, Tabitha took some pictures of the money that we had left. We might have kept some except that the exhange rate provided us an incentive to spend it.

We woke up the next morning and took a cab to the ferry port in Dublin. The cab dispatcher had told us the night before to expect an hour ride, so we had to be ready at 6:00 am. I'm not sure what he was talking about, because the actual ride took about 10 minutes. We were hoping to catch an 8:00 boat, but the ticket agent told us that we would be better to wait for the 8:45 boat. The later one was faster and would actually get us there sooner, and they were both the same price. You can see our actual boat in the second picture below. We had a bit of a wait, but once the boat departed we only had a couple of hours before we could see the coast of England.

To continue the story in Holyhead, click here.

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