Enamored With Ireland

Hope you'll enjoy these photos as much as I enjoyed Ireland.  It was an overcast day and windy at times, plus a bit misty, but pleasant overall.  We have definitely left the Mediterranean temps behind it seems.  You may not know, but Cobh was the last port that Titanic stopped at before making its fateful Atlantic crossing.  This harbor was often a stop for the steamers plying the waters between Ireland and North America.  You can also easily catch a ferry here to go to France, where we will be heading next.

It's a nice small town with a community feel to it.  We happened to arrive on the day of the All Ireland Hurling Final, a big deal on the island, and nearby Cork was in the final so we saw people wearing red and white everywhere we went to support their local county team.  Not sure how to describe hurling except it a little like la crosse, baseball, rugby, and football with no rules.  All the players are amateurs, they have real jobs that they go to every day and play just for the pride of their county.  Money from the ticket sales goes to upkeep of the stadiums and towards youth sports programs.  It's all so different from professional sports we're used to.

Just outside the Cobh terminal is this statue of 17 year old Annie Moore and her brothers, Phillip and Anthony.  She was the first person to ever be processed through the immigrant facility at Ellis Island after having departed from Cobh with the boys to meet their parents in New York in 1891.  

Some of the colorful buildings in the town.

This part of Ireland has plentiful rivers and streams, most of the ones we saw ebbed and flowed depending on the tides.   Shown here is one of the many bridges that we crossed throughout the day.  You can't see them but it was lined with the red and white Cork flags to show support for the hurlers.

You notice on the signs that everything is written in two languages, both English and Irish.  Learning the latter is compulsory in school but there are only a few counties where it is actually spoken regularly, most will speak in English.  And I will admit, it was nice to hear my native tongue spoken all around me once again, albeit with an Irish lilt.

The community of Carrigaline used to be a sleepy village of maybe a couple of hundred people.  Over the last ten years it has become a bedroom community of Cork, the second largest city in the country with a population of about 250,000..

Photo quality is lacking again since I took this out of a bus but it's just to show that the fields were often dotted with grazing cattle.  We were in the heart of dairy land in Ireland, not from from Kerry where they make that expensive but delicious butter we see in the States. Grazing perfection!

So many green fields separated by hedgerows, some were pasture, some grain, some vegetable.

Plus there were flowers, flowers, and more flowers everywhere we went.  This post could have had almost as many flower pictures as the gardens in Singapore!  I especially loved all the hydrangea of course, as well as the large pots of colorful plants like the one in this collage that I saw in the city and towns.

We took a little bit of what is called the Wild Atlantic Way, a fixed driving route along the coast from southern Ireland up to Donegal, over 1200 miles.  Out guide, Mike, said you would need two weeks to really see it all along its narrow winding roads.  Sounds like a roadtrip I'd enjoy, especially after getting a taste of what we'd see.

We stopped for a panoramic view above the pretty town of Kinsale, where we would stop later.

Kinsale has its own harbor, one that is tied to the tides.  In 1602 it was the sight of the Battle of Kinsale between the Irish and Spanish against the English.  These were the days when the locals and the Brits were often fighting and apparently Kinsale had a harbor worth fighting for, the small outlet at the back of the photos goes out to the Atlantic.  The Spanish ended up getting defeated at sea and the Irish on land but the outcome was two forts built on the ends of the entry points in the foreground, Fort James to the right which is just ruins, and Fort Charles to the left which we could still see but which is probably to dark in this photo.

Another view of pretty Kinsale,

plus some of the boats in its harbor.

You can get an idea in this photo how far the tides go down.  The boats sitting on the mud will be floating once the tide comes in again.

The river here goes out to the sea and levels can raise and drop 12-14 feet depending on the tides.

Another bridge with the red and white Cork flags.  There is a lot of county pride in Ireland.  If we'd been in Clare, the opposing team for the day, we would have seen blue and yellow flags everywhere.  We were just glad the game was being played in Dublin so there were no crowds.

A grain field and a lonely stone cottage.

Just enjoy all the greens.  Out on this peninsula was a private golf course.

This point is  called Old Head and it is typical of the craggy coastline of this part of Ireland.

Besides the greens and rocks there were wildflowers everywhere that LeaAnn and I enjoyed.

Definitely didn't want to make a misstep here and take a tumble!

There are small inlets all along here, two inlets to the south is the southernmost point of Ireland.  I don't know what the purple was growing on the hillside but it was lovely.

It wasn't bad going down to the cliff's edge but felt a bit steeper going back up.

Closeup of the rock below and a shot of the old tower at the golf club entrance.

This spot was also the site of the sinking of the Lusitania during WW1.  Survivors were brought to shore here and taken to Kinsale.

A memorial sits here to the 1198 civilians who lost their lives when the ship sank, as well as being the site of the old signal tower and a small Lusitania museum.  They even have one of the masts from the ship as part of the memorial.

Another beautiful inland patchwork view from Old Head.

Nearby was Garylucas beach and a caravan park where people could come to rent a trailer to holiday there.

The currents were strong, hence the flag, and the water was cold but there were still a few diehards out swimming.  Karl and Mark weren't among them, they were just looking at jellyfish, plus I'm sure Karl wanted to check out the water temp.

It was definitely colder than either of them would have wanted to get into.

We originally weren't going to stop at this spot but at my request Mike turned around, pausing our tour so that I could get a vial of sand for my world collection for Heidi..  I think I'm getting close to 50 of them now.  

Thought a photo of part of my "sand squad" was in order today.  These are just part of my friends who make sure I get sand if it's available!  It's become a group project!

We were back at Kinsale for a quick snack.  I'd have loved more time here but we needed to get on to Cork and Blarney.  We went to a grocery and got some delicious sausage rolls and while Karl ate his I went exploring for a few minutes.

I'd seen a sign for a craft fair at a local church as we'd driven into town so I walked over to see what I could find.  This cute lady, Tricia, had some pretty things that I purchased from her.  She was fun to chat with and seemed so surprised that I actually thought her work was beautiful and worth purchasing.  My visit with her made my day.

We headed over to Cork, which was definitely much larger than Kinsale or Cobh.

You get the old and the new right next to one another.

On the left is the tallest building in Cork, no skyscrapers here!  On the right is a monument to Irish independence, which was granted in 1921.

Cork, with rivers running through it, used to be called the "Venice of Ireland".  They finally decided in the 18th century that they needed to create a landed city center so the river was split in two so that the main part of the city became an island between the North River (left) and South River (right).

Lots more colorful homes in Cork.

I laughed when I saw the sign for "The Grumpy Baker" and "The Poor Relation Grocery & Pub".  Cork flags were everywhere around town like the one in the window, and we wondered how the loooooooooong line of Cork supporters were all going to fit into the pub they wanted to go to.  The line in the photo is only about a third of what we saw.  It was unfortunate that they went home disappointed as Cork lost the match/game, whatever they call it, by just one point.

They call this clock tower "The Four Faced Liar".

This old building is a holdover from when the streets were still rivers, the stairs here would have gone down to where people could tie up their boat at the base, then climb the stairs to the entrance.

We made another quick stop in Cork so that Jane could make a visit to the Saints Peter and Paul Church, the place where her grandmother was baptized and then later married, an emotional stop for her.  It had a pretty but simple interior.

Later on we passed this statue of a priest named Father Matthew who tried to curb drunkenness in Cork, without much success.

About 15 minutes from Cork was the entrance to the Blarney Castle and Gardens.  

Our first glimpse of the Blarney Castle.

LeaAnn shared this one with me.   We used this spot for a photo op again later.

The castle was a house/fortress built between the 15th and 17th centuries.  It must have been a drafty and chill existence in there.  Notice the bagpipe player on the right, Karl has some of his music on his YouTube channel.

Just before entering we passed some benches for others to wait on if they chose not to climb.  The line was long and it took us close to an hour and a half to get to the top.

This section out here would have been a watch tower and then the spot on the right with the hole on top is called the "oubliette".  Originally there was a wall across that front opening.  If an unwelcome visitor arrived there was a certain stone you stopped on that was connected to a lever the guard could pull, flipping it and dropping you into the hole below.  The word "oubliette" means to forget, and you can bet if you had gotten dropped down there you would be forgotten.

Located above the entrance to the castle is something called "The Murder Hole", where enemies could find arrows shot at them or boiling oil poured down on them.  This was definitely a defensive home.

The Great Hall was on the first floor and the last wide open space we would be in for a while.

To get to the top you had to climb a narrow, spiral stone staircase, another defensive measure for the castle.

We all managed to make our way up, but I was glad to have that grimy rope to hang on to, those stairs were worn and slick.

Along the way up there were arrow slits, this small room on the right was the "Young Ladies" room.

The view from the top had more gorgeous greens.

A bell tower at the top could have been for warning or for a call to worship.

Okay, so looking up from the bottom you can seen this space where the Blarney Stone is located.  Kissing the Blarney Stone is supposed to give you the gift of gab, or eloquence.  Stories about about where it came from, vary from a stone brought from the Holy Land after the Crusades, or it being a piece of the Stone of Stones which inaugurated the Kings of Scotland.  My favorite story is that the builder of the earliest part of the castle, Cormac MacCarthy, rescued an old woman from drowning in a lake.  It turned out she was a witch (witches can't cross over water), and in gratitude for the good deed she "told him of a certain stone already in his castle that had magic properties and that he could benefit by kissing it".  Whatever the reason, people have been kissing the inner, lower part of that exterior stone for centuries.

What we didn't realized was that you had to be a bit of a contortionist to actually kiss the Blarney Stone!  I managed to get myself down, hang on to the rails, and with the help of that nice young man scoot myself back to kiss the stone.  Karl gave it his best shot but couldn't quite get to the stone, he did kiss the wall above it.

Just behind the castle is the poison garden, full of all kinds of lovely but lethal plants.  I did my best scary face here!

For my Harry Potter potions loving grandchildren I took photos of  mandrakes and wolfsbane.

A couple of other parts of the garden.

There was a small restaurant called the "Caravan Cafe" that had these old Irish caravans sitting next to it.

A next to last view of the castle as we left,

and then one last one I had LeaAnn take with the castle.  It was a memorable and enjoyable visit!

At the end of the day we all went with a few more friends to a restaurant near the ship to celebrate Jane's birthday.  With Emma having flown in for the day to surprise her and spend the day, she'd had an excellent birthday.  We were glad to be there to share it with her!