Since we have spent so much time around the year 1200 this vacation, I decided we should continue that trend. This morning we went to Kilkenny’s Medieval Mile Museum, which houses artifacts and historical items for Kilkenny, starting around, oh, let’s say 1200 (although it was a smidge before that, but who is counting?).

We had booked a guided tour, and I am very glad we did. It was just Meredith and I and our enthusiastic guide Sharon. She took us around the museum, which is housed in a church from 1200, and she explained what we were looking at and why it mattered. Some of the items she shared with us:

• A collection of clay pipe heads used for funerals, a tradition which still continues. She also told us the Irish wake comes from “wake up,” which occasionally happened to the “dead” before modern medicine came along. The tradition of sitting with a body for three days was to make sure the person was dead.
• A rebels’ coin minted from coffin hinges to make money for when Kilkenny was under siege and needed food and weapons.
• The tops of doorways now just peeking out of the floor. Over the years, seventy thousand people were buried in the church itself, which raised the floor level about ten feet.
• Examples of carved crypt covers that became more elaborate over time, showing Kilkenny’s growing size and wealth.
• She shared the fun fact that early Kilkenny would have spoken French because of the Anglo-Norman settlers of the city.

On Sharon’s recommendation, we then walked up the street about five minutes to go to St. Canice’s Cathedral, an actual non-destroyed church that is still in use. It’s probably because it is a modern church, finished in 1285. Happily, the church has an intact (except for the cone on top) round tower from around 900, so it gives it some legitimacy. And the tower is only one of two in Ireland that you can still climb. So we had to do that.

There is head knowledge, and then there is experience. My head knew the towers were very tall, joined by multiple ladders, and there wasn’t much space inside them. It’s another thing to experience climbing six separate ladder-like sets of stairs in a slowly shrinking conic cylinder. The last ladder was very steep and very tight. It certainly would have been a terrible place to be trapped by enemies, and the towers were only used as a last resort for that. You are able to climb out on top of the tower, by climbing five uneven tall stone steps. Meredith and I both managed it, and she enjoyed it as much as you can on a forty-degree day with gusting winds at the top of a tower. I huddled in the middle of the safest area for a minute before retreating to the safety of the uneven steps. I was able to keep my head above the tower to look around.

The cathedral itself is pretty and has a long history. The two objects I liked best were a set of intricate carvings on top of tombs for an important family (next to the list of the family line going back to about 1150 – the current duke/lord/whatever is the twenty-third one), and they have a stone chair that has been used to install bishops since something like 1000. And you are invited to sit in the chair.

After lunch, we drove the hour and a half back to Dublin, where I managed to park the car in a small spot, where I can leave it until Saturday morning. That was a relief. After a quick dumping of stuff in the room, we walked the twenty minutes into the city, passing through the northern part of St. Stephen’s Green. We got supper in the Grafton Street shopping area, and then went off to the surprise of the evening for Mer – we walked up to Sweny’s Pharmacy.

Sweny’s Pharmacy is a place that the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses goes in the book. The pharmacy is now run as a Joyce landmark, and on Thursday nights, you can go into the very small shop and take turns reading out loud from the book. This seemed like something my English-teacher wife should do, and I was right – she loved it, after she got over the confusion of why I wanted her picture in front of a random small store.

The gentleman who organizes it is a gentle and hospitable man who also happens to teach six languages at Trinity. He offered us wine or whiskey and chatted with us for some time. He had a dry sense of humor and made us feel important. He may have given Dale, Meredith’s late father, some competition for the title of my ideal professor stereotype. He seemed like he would be a don at Oxford (if Trinity has the same title). The reading went on for about an hour and a half, and we were joined by about fifteen people in the shop and about ten people online. Not everyone was a native English speaker, and it amazes me that anyone would tackle such a difficult book in a second language. It was a joy hearing the Irish, British, American, and other accents all reading.

That wrapped up the day for us – we walked back to the B and B. From 1200 to 1920 – we’ve had a long day. Time for bed.

Some days I am confronted with getting older. That can be in healing slowly or having minor pains in back, neck, and elsewhere. But more and more it means being clumsy (dropping things and tripping) and forgetting things. Like forgetting to get gas.

We set off happily this morning from our B and B, headed to the supposed-to-be impressive Rock of Cashel. We got a little bit of a late start, but I wasn’t on a strict timeline, so that was okay. Until I glanced at the gauges and suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to get gas last night. I figured we would pass a gas pump at least (if not a full station), but back lane Ireland is really rural. After not seeing any place to get gas, I told my GPS to find a station. It did. Five miles away. Which would take twenty minutes. Sigh.

We did make it to the pump (not a station). There was a man filling a two-gallon container while talking to another man leaning against a car. We waited. The leaning man drove off, and we pulled up. The attendant (it was a full-serve pump) and I had (roughly) the following conversation:

Attendant: Cead failte mile!
Me: Ummm. Hello.
Attendant: Easel or undead?
Me: Ummm. (waves keychain in air that says “Unleaded only”) Unleaded?
Attendant: Tan or twenney?
Me: Ummm. Twenty?
Attendant (pumps gas): Sinead O’Connor mulligan lucky charms erin go bragh guinness craic gob my left shoe U2 bork bork bork. Heh! Ha!
Me (nervously): Ummm. Yeah. (laughs nervously, gets back in car, and drives away with a modicum of gas in tank)

We did eventually get to the Rock of Cashel. Even from the parking lot, it looked impressive. We got out of the car, and I reached for my camera. Enter old-fart moment number two. I had no camera. It was an hour away in my B and B room. Sigh. Happily for me, I did have my travel smartphone with me, and that filled in for my camera for today. Still, not an encouraging moment. It goes down at the third time I’ve blown it with my camera (not charged for Venice’s Burano island, forgotten for Seydisfjordur in Iceland, and now forgotten for Cashel).

The Rock of Cashel looked like to me like a castle, but it is not. The Rock is the rocky hill on which a fortress-looking church complex is built. It used to be a fortress of the king of Ireland, but in 1100, he decided to move his court. But, since his family had taken the Rock from another family, he did not want the other family grabbing it and trying to set up a rival kingdom. So, in a savvy political move, he gave the entire Rock to the church. He gets favorite-son status with the local church, and his rivals can’t try to take the Rock from the church. The church started building a chapel almost immediately.

That is a remarkable church, too. It’s from around 1200, and it is the first Romanesque church in Ireland, and remarkably, it is intact to this day. It had to be refurbished a few years back because the sandstone of which it is made had become waterlogged over nine hundred years. The Office of Public Works built a temporary roof over the whole church for five full years, and that let the stone dry out. They then tore the roof off stone by stone, and replaced twenty percent of the roof’s stones with identical ones, and put the whole thing back together with a thin waterproof lining underneath. Slick.

We were able to go inside the church on our pay-for tour, and while the inside is simple and small (it was a private church for the archbishop), it is nine hundred years old, and there are still small pieces of frescoes on the ceiling, and the carved decorations are still intact. That kind of age is a bit mind-boggling.

After the chapel tour, we took a tour of the rest of the buildings, which are mostly the roofless cathedral (from around 1200) and an intact round tower (which may be as old as being built in 900). The guide said the cathedral was small even by the standards of the time, but all of Ireland only had half a million people. It didn’t need to be big. I thought it looked huge.

We found out about a bishop of Cashel from the 1500s who somehow managed to be both a Catholic bishop (for the north) and a Protestant bishop (for the south). He was finally excommunicated after ten years, but he still somehow managed to have three wives and twenty-seven children (that we know of). He was described as a tall and handsome man. Seems he used that to his advantage.

After the tour was over, we drove an hour back to the Kilkenny region to go see the Jerpoint Abbey. Yes, another ruined abbey. This one is well known for the carvings left behind by the monks who weren’t supposed to have carvings (they weren’t all allowed by their order). No one is sure if the monks just disobeyed the rule or if the rule eventually got relaxed, but the many of the carvings still survive. It is also a large church, and we had it to ourselves, which was pretty fun.

The last stop of the day was…wait for it…another ruined abbey. We went to the Kells Priory complex (not that Kells – another one). It is simply huge, and it is free to see, and we had it to ourselves except for one woman walking her dog on the other side of the complex. I’m not sure what all they did at the Priory, but it involved a substantial defensive wall and dozens of buildings. Mer and I think we found the main church, but it was small compared to the size of the place. It was windswept and lonely and quite marvelous, and as a bonus, we got to see dozens of frolicking lambs in the field through which we had to walk.

We went back to the mill restaurant at which we ate last night, since it was only a mile away, and then got back to our B and B early. We may head out to see if we can find a pub with music, or we may use the evening to get some rest. Either way, compared to what we saw today, I’m feeling pretty young.

Shocking postscript – I went out on the town, in the evening, voluntarily, until 11:00 pm. We went to a tiny pub called The Hole in the Wall in downtown Kilkenny. What a gem. Mer and I walked into the downstairs of the pub, which had about eight seats. We were the only customers. Although I was looking for music, it was too cozy a place to pass up, so we sat down and started chatting with the owner, who is also a cardiologist. While we were chatting, a local couple came in and joined in. We were then eventually joined by four Swedish college students. That was it, for the entire evening. Eight of us and the owner, all chatting, until the Swedes offered to sing. They sang a song in Swedish, and then did an enthusiastic Irish song. We ended up with someone providing music (including Meredith leading “Amazing Grace”) for the rest of the evening. I sadly called our evening over at 10:30 pm. I would have happily stayed until closing. What a pure joy the night was. If you are ever in Kilkenny, please look up The Hole in the Wall – it’s a little tricky to find (it’s down an alley), but it is worth it.

Off to bed. Oh – for those keeping count, ten abbeys and one castle on this trip.

We woke up this morning to the sound of seabirds and the sight of fog. Not a big deal – we were right on the ocean, and I knew the day was supposed to be fine. We got ready, went out for a quick breakfast, and then headed thirty minutes south to Powerscourt House and Gardens.

We got to the gardens about 9:45, and things were still fairly fogged in. We went in to buy our tickets to the gardens, and the women selling them apologized for the weather. We all agreed the fog might burn off later. What was the fuss for fog in a garden?

Powerscourt was voted (by National Geographic) as the third “best” (whatever that definition is) garden in the world, after Versailles and Kew Gardens in London. The garden is pretty fabulous, but what sets it apart is the formal nature of the garden set against the background of the Wicklow Mountains, and especially Great Sugarloaf Mountain. Or so we were told. We couldn’t see the mountains at all – we could barely see across the full length of the gardens. But we could see the section of garden we were in, so off we went.

As an aside, Powerscourt does have a villa, but a fire gutted it in the 1970s just as it was about to open to the public. It has been partially restored for use for weddings, but otherwise is not open to the public.

We spent a happy couple of hours wandering the gardens. There is a formal garden with flower borders (the longest double border in Ireland), and a rhododendron garden, a pet cemetery (that was a new sight for me), a gorgeous Japanese garden, a castle tower (complete with small canons), and a fine main area with grounds that stepped down to a lake with a large fountain. All the while, the fog slowly started to lift. We had lunch, and by the time we were done (toward 1:00), we could see the mountains. They were hazy, but there. That was a happy sight.

Since the fog had largely burned off, the ticket ladies strongly suggested we drive over the Sally Gap in the Wicklow Mountains. I had planned on doing so anyway, but had started wavering, thinking it might be foggy up there. With the encouragement of the native women, I decided to try it. I’m glad I did.

The roads in Ireland range from modern mega highways to (usually) paved cow paths. One of the women asked if I was a nervous driver. Narrow roads winding into mountains with possible sheep and cyclists while I’m driving on the left side of the road? Why would I be nervous? It turned out to be okay – the Wicklow Mountains are largely bare of trees and hedges, so the narrow roads have pretty good sight lines. That allowed me to make sure I could find a pull-off area before oncoming cars, which were rare, got too close.

And the mountains are beautiful. They are bare of trees and so look a lot like heather-covered mountains in Scotland. There are no people about (with the exception of the Guinness family estate, which is fairly distant from the public road). There are lakes up in the hills that are picturesque, and all of this was mostly in the sun. It was a worthwhile forty minute drive to….

Glendalough. Glendalough is the home to a monastic settlement with buildings from the tenth to twelfth centuries, although the monastery was founded in the sixth century. There is a complete hundred-foot round tower, a complete small church, and the ruins of a large (for the time) cathedral. It also has a large Celtic cross, and is all pleasantly situated next to a stream and surrounded by mountains. We strolled through the settlement area, but then also hiked a path up past Lower Lake and on to Upper Lake. Upper Lake was serene, and we just sat on a bench there for some time before heading back to the car.

We drove to our B and B on the outskirts of Kilkenny in the south of Ireland. Our hostess recommended the Kings Mill Restaurant, an Italian place that was in an old mill, complete with waterwheel. That sounded fine to us, and while the food was good, the setting was outstanding – next to a small, beautiful river and downstream from a very pretty bridge. We had a very friendly young waiter who chatted with us a bunch (it was near closing, and so slower). He told us about things to see in the area, which we will probably do if time and the weather cooperate.

And so to help lift my own personal fog, I’m off to bed. For those keeping count, we are now at one castle and seven abbeys in three days.

Sometimes coming up short on time is a huge help. Today, we got launched from Navan around 8:45, which was fine. We had 10:15 admission tickets to Bru na Boinne, the home of the Newgrange and Knowth chamber tombs (as well as many other smaller tombs). I had calculated we had time to go see another ruined abbey, one that has two of the finest high crosses in all of Ireland. What I hadn’t remembered was that I had made all of my time calculations from the village of Slane and not Navan, which is an added difference of twenty minutes. When we actually got to Slane, I decided we had to skip going to the former monastery, and I reset our GPS to Newgrange.

Computers are funny things. When you tell a GPS to get you to Newgrange, it will do that. What it won’t tell you is that you can’t get in to see the tomb without a ticket from the visitors’ center, which is across the Boyne River. Happily, we can read signs, and made the discovery after only a couple of miles (and before we got all the way to the monument). I corrected the GPS by asking it to take us to the visitors’ center.

Computers are funny things. When you tell a GPS to take you to the visitors’ center, it will do that. What it won’t tell you is that the cow path of a road it wants to take you down will indeed be a slight shortcut to the center. We chose to follow the signs on the main road instead.

The Bru na Boinne (Newgrange) Center is a pretty great little museum. It has displays and videos explaining about the tombs and (a little) about the people who built them. You can go through the entire exhibit in about forty-five minutes, which is good, because that is all the time we had before our small bus left to take us to the sites. The quick lowdown on the tombs – there are three major passage tombs, but one is mostly unexcavated. The tombs are all about five thousand years old. The tour includes the two open ones, Knowth and Newgrange. We know little of how or why the people built the tombs, but some of the rock came from thirty miles away or more, and some of the stones weighed more than five tons. Knowth is a larger site, with the main tomb and several smaller tombs. You are allowed on the top of Knowth; since there has been a fort on top and a farm, I guess they figure it’s okay to let tourists on the boardwalks up top. Newgrange has the attraction of your actually being able to go inside the chamber.

We left the center and walked across a very pretty pedestrian bridge across the Boyne River. A short walk led us to the parking lot, and there we met our bus. It took us out to Knowth first, where we spent about forty-five minutes exploring the grounds, which included going to the top. The tomb is surrounded by heavy skirt stones, some of which are decorated with geometric designs. From the top of the mound, you can see in all directions, and signs at the top told you what you were looking at. I found a distant-looking Hill of Tara and a very close Hill of Slane. I was much more excited about seeing the Hill of Slane from the mound that I had any right to be. I never actually recognize things from signs posted on hills or tall buildings, so I kept pointing it out to Meredith. She is a patient wife.

The bus then took us to Newgrange, where we spent another forty-five minutes on site. Meredith and I got to go in the tomb with the first group (of two), a tour of twelve people. You have to stoop in places to continue, and a couple of places are quite narrow, but we ended up in a small chamber shaped like a cross. The three small rooms used to hold human remains of important people. There were many designs etched into the stone in this section. Newgrange is famous for being built such that the interior of the tomb chamber is lit by the sun for a few minutes on the winter solstice. Our guide demonstrated it using a light bulb, and even that was impressive. You can go on the solstice to see it actually happen, if the weather is good and if you win a lottery of ten or so tickets out of thirty thousand entries.

The outside of Newgrange is highly decorated with white and grey stones. The decoration is an interpretation from an archeologist who worked Newgrange in the 1970s. He found all the stones on the ground, decided they’d fallen from the outside of the tomb, and took an educated guess on how they might originally have been arranged. It created some controversy, but I like the effect myself. It looks more imposing and regal than just a mound of grass.

We headed back to the visitors’ center, where we ate a quick lunch (at 1:00). We were then off to the town of Trim. Trim got on my touring radar from having a fairly intact castle in it from around 1200, as well as having an interesting river walk. When my brother mentioned how much he liked Trim’s castle, it firmed up my determination to go see it.

Trim’s castle was built by the Anglo-Normans as a power move, to firm up their rule of eastern Ireland. They started with a central keep/tower space, and eventually added outer walls and a moat. The grounds are free to tour, and a minimal fee gets you a forty-five minute tour of the interior, which included the roof. We did that, of course. The tour was interesting, and the views from the top were great on a sunny day like today. We both loved the tour.

We then followed a walking tour from Mer’s favorite guidebook writer, Rick Steves. We followed the Boyne River for a ways, until we got to the ruins of a large Gothic church (all after having met two older gentlemen who talked to us about considering becoming Catholic – it is Ireland, after all). The ruins of the church were impressive, but so was the old (and still in use) cemetery surrounding it – it had huge trees growing all over, and many Celtic crosses for tombstones. It was a pretty spot, for ruins and a graveyard. We weren’t done being ruined yet, though – we continued on a little bit to a ruined church/hospital complex from the thirteenth century. We returned the way we came, and fit in one more quick ruin – the tower of an abbey destroyed by Cromwell; the tower used to be seven stories tall. It is still impressive even standing in ruins.

So, if you are keeping ruins count, we’re up to six ruined abbeys and one castle, in two days. We would have seen even more in this area, but sometimes time is short.

For weeks I had been trying to figure out what I wanted to do with Meredith over our spring break vacation. I kept looking at places to go in Europe, since Mer loves traveling. But I kept running into ever-changing and sometimes hard-to-understand Covid-related restrictions and requirements. Finally, about three weeks ago, Ireland announced it was dropping all Covid entry forms and tests. I booked our tickets the same day.

We flew out of Dulles (Washington) for the first time; driving six hours saved us about eight hundred dollars on airfare. It was a bit tense leaving Ohio when we hit a heavy snow squall that lasted about thirty minutes; I was afraid we were going to be driving at thirty miles per hour for a long time and so we would miss our flight. Happily, the snow stopped, and after an easy and uncrowded airport experience, we ended up at our gate almost three hours early. I’ve agreed that next time we can try leaving thirty or forty-five minutes later.

We arrived in Dublin this morning (Sunday), and we had our car and were off on our first day of touring by 7:00 am. That meant we had about five hours of touring to do before we could get into our B and B and get the three-hour nap that we do to try to break jetlag issues. We were fairly tired, but excited to be in Ireland.

Our first two stops were the Hill of Tara, a series of five-thousand-year-old mounds that were used for burials and other unknown uses. Later, Tara became the place where Irish kings were crowned. We stopped there twice because the visitors’ center didn’t open until 10:00, and we needed a restroom break. Off we went in search of a gas station, and then we returned.

The Hill of Tara is a very broad hill. Meredith and I both had pictured some small but dramatic mound towering over the rest of the landscape. Not so much – it is a very large site. You can walk around and even on the mounds, but they are hard to appreciate fully from the ground since the scale of them is so large. Arial photos help (on info placards at the entrance), but what our guidebook said really helps is the visitors’ center and tours offered from there. Which was closed for two more hours. Still, we were glad to be able to picture the hill for when it comes up in literature or history.

We then drove on to the larger-than-expected town of Navan, where our B and B is located. I thought Navan would be a village, but it is a town of thirty thousand people. I drove out to north of the town down a very narrow road to go see Dunmoe, a ruined castle. What none of the websites at which I looked told me was that the castle is in the middle of a field, surrounded by barbed wire for livestock. I didn’t see an obvious way in, and there was nowhere to park, so I turned around. One minor tourism failure.

I drove back through town to whence we had come, to go down a wider back road full of Sunday bikers out riding. We pulled up to an actual parking lot for the Bective Abbey, which is a ruin of an abbey that was destroyed by Henry VIII. It overlooks the Boyne River and so is a very pretty place to wander about. After we were there for about thirty minutes, we walked down to the Boyne and the pleasing stone bridge that was built over it. A nice man gave us permission to walk right down to the river, and he told us that a Ben Affleck film had used the bridge in a movie a year or two ago.

Back in town, we pulled up to a street that seemed to be a little in disrepair (closed businesses and shuttered homes). I wanted to check out the Lighthouse Church, and the address was for this street. We found it, only to discover that it was the offices, and the church itself met elsewhere. But it wasn’t posted in the window of the office.

Enter new-to-me technology. For years we have traveled with friends who have smart phones and use them to aid in solving various things that pop up when traveling. I hate phones myself, but I caved enough for travel to get a Google Fi phone that I can deactivate when we aren’t on vacation. I used it in this case, and found that the church worshipped in a hotel a couple of miles away, and we had just enough time to get there.

It is a lively and active church. The announcements were full of listings of ministries and Bible studies (including one in Portuguese). The music was contemporary (and loud), but was well done and enthusiastic. The pastor preached on witnessing and how we all have unique (and therefore important) stories to tell. He used three women from the book of Acts as examples of ordinary  women whose stories are still being told – one woman provided (was generous), one prioritized God by risking meeting with believers, and one woman persevered even when things were hard. It was a satisfying service full of cute accents, and the people were very welcoming.

I then got to use my phone again. After my GPS seemed to show that our B and B was on the next road over from the church (but with no street address), I used my phone to verify that this was the case. And it was. What a blessing to two people who had been up for twenty-six hours! We drove over and were able to get into our room, where we slept for three hours and showered.

Feeling much more human, we drove to the village of Slane to eat at a restaurant attached to a hotel. The food was very good and quite welcome to our time-screwed-up bodies. But we could have gotten food in Navan – I took us to Slane because I wanted Mer to see the Hill of Slane, which has a small (ruined, of course) abbey at the top.

Tradition holds that Patrick of saint fame lit an Easter fire on the hill, thereby making a local king mad. However, they made up, and the king became a Christian. The abbey was added much later and was finally abandoned in the 1700s. But it makes a wonderful place now to see a sunset on a gloriously sunny day. The cemetery located there is still in use, and many of the graves had fresh flowers on them; one grave even had a note to “Mum” because today was Mothers’ Day in Ireland.

I thought that was it for the day, but on the way back to the B and B, I swung in to one more cemetery since it was right off the road. It had a very intact round tower there, so we got to see that. Since the towers were places to hide during raids, the “ground” floor door is twelve feet off the ground, and was accessed by a ladder that could be pulled up after everyone was inside.

And then we really did come back to our home for the night. We should get a good sleep tonight and hit the ground touring tomorrow. At least we won’t be ruins after some food and sleep.