A Little Trip to Ireland

As far as I’m concerned, the joys of my Dublin trip began in the Leeds Bradsford Airport, where the cafe was trying to get rid of all their stock and I was able to get a salmon baguette for but one quid. The delicious food experiences were only to continue as the weekend proceeded, and what better time to make note of them than now? If you’re not interested in what I ate, you clearly don’t appreciate food enough.

Birthday cake

The following day we had lunch at an oddly decorated but quite charming cafe where Jessie (who came over for the first two days) and I shared a goat’s cheese tartlet for starters, while she had for mains the day’s soup with the most amazing bread, and I had a Spanish omelette covered in cheese. For our dinner at a fine little restaurant that overlooked the river, and gave us a fine view of a rainbow, I had pork with cubes of black pudding and, to nicely compliment it, grated beetroot; Jessie had perfectly done chicken with roast vegetables in a nice sweet-savoury sauce. Finally, the fare of my birthday – fish and chips on the waterfront (observed by a wicked rook) in a little seaside village called Howth and, at a table for one with a checkered cloth, pizza and tiramisu.

Ooh!

On our arrival, I was somewhat daunted by the size of the hostel we had booked for. It had three levels, all rather full, and the reception area was at the end of a gauntlet of loud celebrating guests. There was a quiet bar across the road, where we had a drink before going to bed. In the morning we took care of important business – a pair of shoes, and a pair of jeans, to replace items of ours that had fallen into severe disrepair. The river made a nice little break in the city, and also showed a divide between newer buildings on one side and older buildings on the other. It was difficult at first to find the green places in the city, but once found it was marvellous, for they were very green indeed where they were meant to be, and in other places full of colour for bulbs and blossoms and blooms. We also discovered a face picked out in the grass.

As in Edinburgh, there were two museums I visited – the National Museum, and the Writer’s Museum, for also like Edinburgh the city has been given special recognition (UNESCO Cities of Literature) as having produced several significant literary figures. Chaps like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde, and a few dames too, have been granted plaques and statues around the city. The Museum gives information about them, but also other writers. There are all kinds of items as you’d expect, but also some portraits displayed in a large and fancy room above the main display rooms. The National Museum had some fantastic displays of ancient treasure hoards, weapons, daily items, and people. There were three bog people, their hides kept quite well in tact over the centuries from their burial in bogs. It’s because of the bogs, too, that many items have been discovered in Ireland. The art gallery too was worthwhile, especially as it clearly marked out the Irish artists – and there were some very nice artworks.

There we go, the Brooch

I was also quite interested in the Garden of Remembrance. I’m used to such memorials for those who have fallen being for World War I and II, with the other wars tacked in on the edges. Here the pool had patterns of shields in it, and the statue was of three figures falling in action. Their clothes were nondescript. Breaking free from the bodies were swans.

The weather on my birthday, when we took a bus out to Howth, was again a little mixed, but mostly it was sunny. Howth is on a peninsula, and we walked the cliffs around some of it. Again, I was struck by the greenness, and the sense of spring. The vanilla scent of gorse was strong in the air, and little birds hid in hedges, teasing us as we passed. We had a fine view of two little islands as we came around the head, one accessible by kayak and, I think, called the Eye of Ireland, and the other privately owned. I wouldn’t mind owning an island in Ireland. I was given a birthday gift there, though, of a triquetra Celtic knot from Scotland. Later, I caught up with an old flatmate.

The final thing I did was perhaps my favourite, because I got to see more green and because I got to see some very old things. I took a tour out into the Boyne Valley to see Newgrange and the Hill of Tara. The Boyne Valley is a very fertile area, with the river Boyne flowing through it, and these are surely among the reasons that it was chosen in ancient times to be the seat of Ireland’s civilisation. Newgrange is one of three large hill-like structures in the valley, along with Knowth and Dowth, considered to be tombs. Large stones were carefully brought in and arranged on top of each other, without the help of technologies such as the wheel, to form dome-like watertight enclosures aligned with important astronomical events. When they were left and fell out of memory, outer walls collapsed, and the grass on top had liberty to spread down the sides on the freed earth. The inside stones, however, mostly stayed as they were.

Newgrange

The entrance to the Tomb, with the carved entrance stone
at the front, and the roof box visible above

Newgrange is the tomb that can be entered. It has been reconstructed on the outside, to put the fallen stones back in their perceived places, but the inside has not been touched – except by graffiti artists a few centuries ago, when the tomb was rediscovered but hadn’t yet been protected. I spotted my own initials carved into the rock. These days you would probably be shot if you tried to do something like that. Visits are very restricted, and rightly so. People brushing against the thin stone passage as they pass through begin to wear them away, along with the beautiful geometrical carvings made by the ancients. We were led in in a small group, but it was a tight squeeze when we got to the centre. I could clearly see the structure of the stones, with the cap on the top. There were three little alcoves (do you use this word? Alcoves?) that held large bowl-like stones. There are many theories as to what they were for, including a resting place for the dead. It’s the alignment of the ‘roof box’ that people tend to know of the most, for at the equinox the sun aligns perfectly with a little gap above the entrance way with its marvellous carved stone beneath, and a long thread of light stretches down the passageway, penetrating the darkness for just a short few minutes before departing. This was simulated with a light bulb, pale surely in comparison to the sun, but quite incredible. With the lights switched off, it is very dark inside, and the line of light could easily be a passage for the spirits of the dead to travel out of this forsaken world.

Detail on another stone around the edge of the monument

Some bumps on the Hill of Tara

Our second stop, after passing by a castle before which many stars (including Springsteen) have played and in which they have then stayed, and driving past beautiful shades of growth on the hills, was Tara. Because of the rain, we were ushered to a little second hand book store run by an elderly chap by the name of Michael Slavin, who’s written books about the area. He gave us a short talk about the hill and showed us some slides. We then went out to look at the hill. It was so very green, a kind of shade I can’t quite think of without being overwhelmed. Tara was, perhaps, the proper seat of the kingdom, where druids felt something important in the ground and the air. The hill has been shaped in dips and rises, in circles. Items have been found here – items I saw in the museum, including the Tara Brooch that came from nearby (and was the emblem for my high school).  There’s a church built on the site of an ancient church. A little further down the well is a sacred well, turned holy when Christianity came.

A rook, and lots of gorgeous green

Sacred water, or holy well?

I left my red hair tie on the fairy tree on the Hill of Tara, along with a thousand other ribbons and rags. Sadly, the Stone of Destiny, that’s said to roar when the true monarch touches it, didn’t roar for me.