The Boyne and the Wicklows

Wednesday 20 June: took the airport shuttle bus to the airport, picked up a rental car, and started driving north. On the left side of the road. A good deal of the drive was on "motorway" (equivalent to a U.S. interstate highway), which was fairly easy, but the twisty narrow country roads are trickier. We haven't yet been on any REALLY narrow roads like the ones I remember from rural Scotland fifteen years ago, where two cars going opposite directions can't pass unless one of them pulls off at a wide spot in the road.

The Valley of the Boyne River has a lot of historic sites, of which we visited two 5000-year-old grave mounds (Knowth and Newgrange) and one Norman castle (at Trim).

( Knowth and Newgrange )

( Trim Castle )

Then we drove back to our B&B in the southern Dublin suburb of Donnybrook. This was the trickiest driving of the day, and I hope of the whole vacation: we didn't want to drive through the middle of downtown Dublin, as Google Maps's directions suggested, so we took the beltway, got off one exist earlier than we probably should have, and wandered through a lot of twisty suburban roads none of which go quite the direction one would like them to.

Thursday 21 June: It was raining steadily, so we wanted to do something indoors at the start of the day: we took a bus into the centre of Dublin, picked up a few more items at the Trinity College Library gift shop (where we had earlier seen parts of the Book of Kells and two of its friends), picked up a cable to connect an iPhone to the car stereo, and took the bus back to the B&B.

( Wicklows and Glendalough )

Anyway, we drove over the pass and down into the richer farmland of the interior, still on tiny twisty country roads until we reached the motorway that took us to Kilkenny, where we are now.

Friday, 22 June: Kilkenny and Tipperary

Last night we had dinner at a sort of gastropub in Kilkenny. Decent food, and it's the first place we've been yet with an evening live-music show. It was three or four guys playing (variously) guitar, mandolin, harmonica, tin whistle, etc. and singing a mix of trad and trad-sounding songs.

Woke in the B&B in Kilkenny, had breakfast, checked out of the room, and walked a block away to Kilkenny Castle. Originally a wooden fort built by Strongbow, it was inherited by William Marshal (through his wife, Strongbow's heir), who replaced it with a trapezoidal stone castle. It abruptly became a U-shaped castle when Oliver Cromwell's artillery knocked down one of the four sides. The resident noble family finally abandoned it in 1935, then sold what remained of the building to the landmarks commission in 1995. A multi-million-pound restoration project aimed at restoring it to its Victorian glory, and much of the castle is now furnished in 19th-century style (although one can still see some of the medieval foundations).

Down the road is St Canice's Cathedral, which was built (IIRC) in the 12th or 13th century, except for the adjacent round tower which dates to the 9th century. St Canice's is among other things the final resting place of Bishop Richard Ledrede, compiler of the Red Book of Ossory (a 14th-century "filk book", full of sacred lyrics "to be sung to the tune of" various well-known pop tunes, only one of which survives). I got a photo of his tomb effigy, as well as of several other tomb effigies which are consistently dressed at least a hundred years behind the fashions: double-pointed hennins and V-necked gowns in the late 16th century? We also climbed the round tower and took a few photos from the top.
( pictures from Kilkenny )

Then drove on to the Rock of Cashel, which was the seat of a series of feuding Kings of Munster until 1101, when the guy who had just grabbed it from his rivals donated it to the Church, thus effectively keeping it out of his rivals' hands and ingratiating himself with the Church. What had been chosen as a highly defensible castle became a highly defensible cathedral for several hundred years, until a 17th-century bishop got tired of living in a castle with six-foot-thick walls and one fireplace in the whole building, on top of a rock that catches every wind in Ireland, so he moved first his residence, and then the Cathedral, down the hill and abandoned the old cathedral site.
( Pictures from Cashel )

( Lunch somewhere in County Tipperary )

Enough of that. We're in a B&B in Adare, just outside Limerick.
( Pictures of B&B )