Ireland - New Ross, Killarney and the Dingle Peninsula

You can't have a rainbow without the rain.  After a couple of sunny days in Dublin, the real Irish weather returned.  We were told that it rained almost every day in Ireland, and we can't really argue with that. But this rainbow accompanied us most of the morning as we drove from our B&B in Killarney to the Dingle Peninsula, so we couldn't really complain.

But I'm jumping ahead in the story.  

We left Dublin with no real plan, just to see where the roads took us.  

They eventually took us to New Ross in central southern Ireland.  New Ross is famous for its most famous emigrant--Patrick Kennedy, the great-grandfather of President Kennedy.  Patrick Kennedy left Ireland during the Great Famine in 1848.  The rest is, you know, history.  

President Kennedy visited the Kennedy homestead just outside New Ross in 1963. It was a very big deal then, and still is today for the town.  Pictures and banners of the President are everywhere downtown. Members of the family still own and live in the actual homestead but have opened the grounds, a few outbuildings and a very well done visitor center to the public.  The private home, below is where the President had tea with his cousin. The courtyard was filled with poiticians the press and local people who had been invited. 

We ended up staying overnight in New Ross, a nice small town on a river.  Apparently it had been a major inland port since the 12th century.  Patrick Kennedy emigrated from there in one of the saling ships known as "famine ships" and you can tour one in the harbor if you wish.  They aren't very big.  We looked at it and thought about how desperate someone would have to be to leave on a ship that small.

We decided to make Killarney our base for exploring Killarney National Park and the Dingle Peninsula.  We found a lovely historic B&B (above) literally across the street from the Park, and it came with a donkey!  What more could one ask for?  The donkey's name is Paddy.

Killarney National Park is beautiful.  That's all you really need to know.  Go there.  Leave now.

If you're a data geek, here are some factoids--it was the first national park in Ireland, created when the Muckross Estate was donated in 1932.  It's over 25,000 acres in size and, according to Wikipedia, is one of the very few places in Ireland that has been continuously covered by woodland since the end of the most recent glacial period, about 10,000 years ago. 

We loved that, from the B&B, we could just walk into the park and around one of the lakes.  There are well marked trails.  Many are used for walkers, bikers and horse carts (called "jaunting carts") but some are designated for walkers only.  The jaunting carts are quite popular, and you do have to watch where you walk.  An admittedly poor picture of a jaunting cart:

Our first walk took us to the Friory, established in 1445 and broken up by Cromwell in 1652.

Hauntingly beautiful and serene, and amazingly accessible.  We were able to climb to the second floor and would have ascended the tower if Fred's efforts to pick the lock with our room key had worked.

This incredibly ancient yew tree was planted in the courtyard.  Could it have been planted before Cromwell destroyed the Friory?  Probably not, but there are yew trees in the park that are 200 years old.

The walls of the friory stand sentinel over the cemetary, which is still in use today.

We also visited Ross Castle, a 15th century tower house.  We took the guided tour inside which has been restored in part.  The tour gave a very detailed look at life in that time period.  And went up and down a lot of very tiny spiral staircases.

A pair of rooks, a kind of crow, at the Castle.  The older one is in the foreground with the white bill.  We also saw a pair of white-tailed eagles at the lake, part of a population re-introduced in 2007.

We walked to the Torc Waterfall from the B&B only to discover that the tour buses got there first!  Bedlam!  Our serenity was seriously disturbed.  But it was an overall pleasant walk of a couple miles, round trip, greatly enhanced by the presence of toilets at the falls and by the jaunting carts going by on the footpaths.

Our last day at the park we drove to the grounds of Muckross House, built in 1843 and the basis for the original park.  The gardens are phenomenal, and worthy of a visit even if you don't want to visit the house.  Great photo ops and walking paths.  The grounds also have a visitor center and a working farm.

I'lll add a picture of Muckross House after we get home (different camera) or you can Google it.

You might have noticed I still haven't mentioned the Dingle Peninsula.  Dingle deserves its own blog entry....so that's next.

Belfast and the Peace Wall

Aside from seeing the Titanic, we wanted to go to Belfast to contrast it to Dublin and learn more about the "Troubles" and the divison of Ireland.  Of course, the equivalent of about two days in Dublin and an afternoon in Belfast doesn't even skim the surface of this very complicated history, but it's what we had.

Our guide at the Kilmainheim Gaol in Dublin had told us that the line to divide Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland was drawn to include as many "Loyalists" (to the UK) as possible in the North.  "Gerrymandering," I said.  "Yes, exactly!"

And that was obvious when we took our tour of Belfast.  In part of the city, British flags are everywhere.  The streets were lined with the Union Jack.  The "Loyalists" are largely Protestant and the "Nationalists" are largely Catholic. 

We were shown part of the "Peace Line" along the Falls Road that separates, still, parts of eastern and western Belfast--separating the Protestant and Catholic sections.  There are "Peace Gates" which are closed at sundown.  The Peace Lines were started in the sixties, meant to be temporary, but have been lengthened and made stronger since then, including after the Belfast Agreement in 1998.  A survey last year indicated that 69% of residents think the walls are still necessary to curb violence.

The murals of Belfast, many painted on the walls, are famous and quite a tourist attraction.  There are murals depicting both sides of the schism.  The first picture, at the top of this entry, is Fred looking at a mural celebrating black freedom fighters and heroes from around the world--Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Sojourner Truth, Barack Obama.  Obviously, we're passing Frederick Douglas...who apparently visited Ireland in the 1840s.

The one below is to poet and IRA member Bobby Sands, who joined the IRA at age 16 and died in prison leading the the 1981 hunger strike.  The following mural has one of his poems on it.  Reportedly, Nelson Mandela was inspired to do his hunger strike by Bobby Sands.  This is apparently a popular photo op for nationalist politicians.

The mural below is notable for the two murals it contains (Ignore the Jeep ad...).  One is to Ulster Defense Association (Loyalist) member Robert Dougan, who was shot in his car by the IRA in 1998 after the cease fire in 1994.  The other is to Northern Ireland footballer George Best, who died in 2005 of complications of a liver transplant.  Best said of his career "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars--the rest I just squandered."

We read that some want to take down the political murals as they are seen as divisive, and want them replaced with murals celebrating celebrities, such as the one about George Best.  I hope that doesn't have to happen, but I can also understand the point.

Some more murals...

 

You can take a virtual tour of the murals at http://www.virtualbelfastmuraltour.com/.

Having just been to the Celebration of the 1963 March of Washington, we couldn't help comparing the battle led by Martin Luther King, using non-violent acts of civil disobedience, with the violence across Ireland, north and south.  It's sad that the divisiveness continues today....

The bus dropped us off back in town and we started walking toward (we hoped) the train station.  Those who know Fred will not be surprised to learn that we decided to stop for a snack. :D

We found this quaint shopping area, complete with Apple Store:

Compare it to this building we passed on the bus:

After our snack, we asked a pleasant-looking man walking past for directions to the station.  He promptly reversed direction and guided us to where we could see the station, probably a half mile out of his way!  We had a great talk; it turned out he was in charge of the giraffes at the Belfast Zoo. 

We made the last train out of Belfast for Dublin that night.  That should also not surprise anyone....

Afterword:  we spent the next several days in The Republic of Ireland, but saved our Pounds Sterling to use when we returned to England.  Much to our surprise, they are not accepted in England!  We thought pounds sterling would be pounds sterling?

Next: exploring southern Ireland

A Nation Once Again.

When boyhood's fire was in my blood 

I read of ancient freemen, 
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood, 
Three hundred men and three men; 
And then I prayed I yet might see 
Our fetters rent in twain, 
And Ireland, long a province, be. 
A Nation once again! 

A Nation once again, 
A Nation once again, 
And lreland, long a province, be 
A Nation once again! 

And from that time, through wildest woe, 
That hope has shone a far light, 
Nor could love's brightest summer glow 
Outshine that solemn starlight; 
It seemed to watch above my head 
In forum, field and fane, 
Its angel voice sang round my bed, 
A Nation once again! 

It whisper'd too, that freedom's ark 
And service high and holy, 
Would be profaned by feelings dark 
And passions vain or lowly; 
For, Freedom comes from God's right hand, 
And needs a Godly train; 
And righteous men must make our land 
A Nation once again! 

So, as I grew from boy to man, 
I bent me to that bidding 
My spirit of each selfish plan 
And cruel passion ridding; 
For, thus I hoped some day to aid, 
Oh, can such hope be vain ? 
When my dear country shall be made 
A Nation once again!

--Traditional Irish song of rebellion, written in the 1840s.   It was played on the bus we took in Dublin.  Which, of course, is part of "a nation once again"--the Republic of Ireland.  The nationalists in Northern Ireland are still waiting.

Belfast and the Titanic Quarter

Last Friday, we took the two-hour train ride from Dublin's Connolly Station for a day trip to Belfast in Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom.  We really wanted to see Belfast, both for the Titanic Museum and to see what Belfast is like compared to Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, since the Troubles (mostly) ended.  Plus it was an excuse to take a train ride.  It was a lovely trip, through much farmland and an occasional small town.  The train was new and modern (WiFi!), the tracks smooth, and the service on time.

We took our passports, thinking there would be some kind of entry process, but we just walked off the train and into Belfast.  Suddenly we were back in the UK, though we did see the occasional sign in Gaelic.  We procured some pounds (having been using euros in Ireland) and bought the hop-on, hop-off Belfast Tour bus to both take a tour of the city and get to Titanic Belfast.  Memorably, the Belfast Tour salesman almost got hit by a bus running ahead to make sure his bus waited for us. 

First stop for us, Titanic Belfast.

The Titanic was built in Belfast, at the enormous Harland & Wolff shipyard.  In the pic above, the brick building to the right of the Titanic Belfast building is the original drafting offices of Harland & Wolff.  Each corner of the silvery Titanic Exhibit is as high as the Titanic's hull. At the time that the Titanic was built, 1909-1911, H&W employed about 15,000 people and built 126 ships, including a sister ship to the Titanic, the Olympic, built alongside the Titanic. (There was also a third Olympic Class ship built.)  The dockyards and shipbuilding allowed Belfast to be a boom town and the industrial center of Ireland at that time.  Over time, H&W employed 30,000 people in Belfast and is still in existance today.

You proceed chronologically through the museum/exhibition, which puts the construction of the Titanic in context with the era and with Belfast.  The first part really puts the amount of sheer hard labor it took to build the Titanic in perspective.  A ride takes you through part of the Titanic under construction with riveters working around you.  Because the original gantry was 220 feet high, the ride moves through several levels.  An estimated 3 million rivets were used in the construction of the hull.  I read that a four-man team could complete 200 rivets a day.  It was all by hand.  One image that stays with me is that the riveters wore scarves to protect their necks from the sparks.  3000 men worked on the Titanic; 8 died during construction.

The next part of the exhibit talks about the fittings on the ship to accommodate the passengers, and the passengers themselves.  Much has been said about the first class passengers, such as Margaret "Unsinkable Molly" Brown and John Astor IV, but about a thousand of the 1300 passengers were second and third class passengers. A few passengers have their stories told on the walls as you move through.

A typical third class room is shown below; second class also had bunks, but a larger, nicer room.  The first class rooms were pretty much like the best hotel room you've been in.  The decor and fittings of the first class decks were simply amazing.  There's a cool 180 degree video that takes you from the keel of the ship up through all the levels all the way to the bridge.

Eventually, of course, you come to the iceberg.  You enter a room whose walls are covered with the messages that passed between the Titanic and other ships as it hit the iceberg and began to sink.  A graphic of a sinking ship plays over and over again on the wall and readings of passenger accounts play as you make your way through the room.  Stark and moving.

We finished with the room that accounts for the survivors and then tells of the investigations in both the US and Britain.  There are amazing photos of the ship that brought in the survivors. The Titanic's sister-ships, the Olympic and the Britannic, were retro-fitted after the disaster to strenghten the hulls.   The Britannic was sunk by a German mine during WWI.  The Olympic lived out its lifespan and was decommissioned in the 30s.

We thought it was well worth seeing.  There also is a two story theatre where you can watch as the Titanic's wreckage is explored, a snack bar and a restaurant, and of course, a gift shop.  Outside metal uprights mark the location of the slips where the Titanic and the Olympic were built.  There's also an additional boat cruise that you can take.

Titanic By The Numbers

3 years and $4.7 million to build

883 feet long

825 tons of coal burned a day

First class ticket: 2,966 pounds sterling

Number of ice warnings received: 6

Time to sink: 2 hours 40 minutes

Number of lifeboats: 20

32% of passengers and crew got seats, not all lifeboats were filled

Time for Carpathia to arrive: 1 hour 50 minutes

Number of passengers and crew saved by Carpathia: 705

Number of dogs who survived: 2 (out of nine)

68% of Titanic's passengers and crew died.

92% of those who died were male.

9% of those who died were first class passengers, 28% of survivors were.

11% of those who who died were second class passengers, 17% of survivors were.

35% of those who died were third class passengers, 25% of survivors were.

45% of those who died were crew, 30% of survivors were.

---from titanicbynumbers.com

Back on the bus for a tour of Belfast...

Dublin, Old and New

One of our guides in Dublin said "In America, 100 years is long and 100 miles is short; in Ireland, 100 years is short and 100 miles is long."

I thought of this as I read our guidebook's discussion of Dublin, which starts out "Until 500AD, Dublin was little more than a crossroads..."  Its first name, Baile Atha Cliath (City of Hurdles) was given it by Celtic traders in the second century AD.   Hard to imagine for this immigrant to Virginia, where "Old Town" Alexandria was founded in 1695.  By 1695, Dublin had been invaded by (among others) Norsemen (837), Anglo-Normans (12th century) and Cromwell (1651). 

We could hardly cover all of that history in the short time we had, so we took the "hop on, hop off" bus from our hotel to get the big picture and visit a few sites--Kilmainham Gaol, Trinity College, the Book of Kells, the Ha'penny Bridge, Temple Bar, and St Stephen's Park.

 The bell tower and front green at Trinity College.

Almost mandatory when visiting Dublin is seeing the Book of Kells, a 9th-century illustrated set of the gospels, at Trinity College's Old Library.  We highly recommend taking one of the student-led tours of Trinity which includes entry to the Book of Kells (and why not?--it's only another Euro over the price of a ticket to see only the Book).  Our guide was a recent graduate of Trinity who pointed out the oldest student housing on the campus--no heat, one shower facility and no WiFi!  

The Book of Kells is a magnificent work of art.  You can see, at any one time, four of the pages, and they are incredible.  There is a wonderful exhibition that examines the artwork in detail.  Sorry, no pictures allowed at the Book of Kells, you'll have to Google it to see it.

Trinity College (chartered in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth) is home to the Old Library (above), which has the right to a copy of every book published in Ireland and the UK, kind of like our Library of Congress.  The books are stored by size.  The Old Library also has a very early Irish harp and one of the original 1916 Proclamations of the Irish Republic.  And a very nice gift shop.

  

The struggle for Irish independence was a recurring theme and constant companion on our tour.  Reminders and memorials are everywhere you look in Ireland, many of the streets, bridges and buildings have been renamed after the heroes, and the people live and breathe it still.  It's one of the reasons Gaelic sports are king here and soccer, not so much.

We visited the 1795 Kilmainham Gaol (pronounced "jail"), where 14 of the 15 executions from the 1916 rebellion took place, and where the leaders of every uprising since it was built (1798, 1803, 1848, 1867 and 1916) were imprisoned.  Our guide there was an amateur historian (shown below in the courtyard of the prison) who told us, over lunch, that his wife couldn't believe he got paid to talk.

The tour, which began and ended in the Irish language, was intense and fascinating, taking us through the prison's history from a debtors' prison through the famine years and ending in the courtyard with the executions of the 1916 Rising.  An unexpected tidbit was that one of the famous scenes from the original Italian Job starring Michael Cain was filmed at Kilmainham in the main cellblock:

We skipped the highly touted (and expensive) tour of the Guinness Storehouse and opted instead to go buy a Guinness in one of the pubs of the Temple Bar district. :D  Before arriving, I thought the Temple Bar was, well, a bar.  But it's a district within the city, like Greenwich Village or Georgetown.  Lively, lots of pubs and artists.  When we were there, there was a lot of liquid prep for the Ireland vs Sweden hurling match to take place at the Croke Park stadium (thankfully, after we left town).

Just outside Temple Bar is a statue to Dublin's legendary fishmonger Molly Malone, or, as our tour guide called her, "The Tart With the Cart."  We were told that she's somewhat controversial and that some want her removed.  We were also told she might have been selling more than fish.

In Dublin's Fair City

Where the girls are so pretty

I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone

As she wheel'd her wheel barrow

Through streets broad and narrow

Crying cockles and mussels alive, alive-o

Alive, alive o!, Alive, alive o!

Crying cockles and mussels alive, alive o!

Next: Belfast...

Ireland

It's a long way to Tipperary....or at least it seemed that way as we made our way through Heathrow Airport to catch our Aer Lingus flight. It's a very long way indeed from Terminal 3 to Terminal 1 at Heathrow. 

Finally, 17 hours after we left our home in Alexandria, we were in Dublin on a beautiful warm, sunny day.  It does rain in Ireland, nearly every day, we were told, but it took almost 48 hours for us to see any.

Dublin is a vibrant, bustling mix of old and new.  Our hotel, north of the historic city, was new, next to a new stadium, Croke Park, where they play Gaelic football and hurling. Little known in the US, and certainly not known to us, these sports are huge in Ireland. Occasionally, the British import, soccer (as we call it) is played there. A cab driver told us that it was a proud moment when the British played soccer at Croke Park, and there were no jeers when God Save the Queen was played.

Even though we'd walked enough at Heathrow, We walked from the hotel down to the bustling shopping district near the river to have a pub dinner and do a little people-watching.  No, we did not eat at The Pieman Cafe, above.  

We were intrigued to see a polite single-file queue for the bus.  I'm not sure we've seen that anywhere.  I can assure you that, in Spain, you will NOT get on the bus ahead of any of the little old ladies dressed in black, no matter how close you are to the bus when the doors open.

The signs are in both Gaelic and English.  References to Irish history and famous Irish writers are everywhere, especially to Dublin's native son, James Joyce and to the heroes of Irish independence.  Here's one of the many memorials to James Joyce, in St. Stephen's Green.

Tomorrow, our tour of historic Dublin.  Mind you, at this point in our travels, we don't try to see everything...but what we did see was grand!