County Tipperary and Cashel

Pip and I slept in this morning (sinful when on holidays, but we were exhausted). While we dozed, mum and dad drove out along the peninsula to look at the Blasket islands across the water - they're both very interested in the history of the area. The Blaskets were almost completely isolated from contemporary "modern" life on the mainland, right up until the islands were evacuated sometime in the 1950s; no electricity, no "entertainment" as other people would have understood the term then. People on the Blaskets would visit others' houses of an evening to play music and tell stories - with no need for memory-corrupting writing, the oral history of the place had practically gone centuries undisturbed when anthropologists first got interested. (Yeah, I shouldn't have slept in, should I?)

The parents arrived back about 10, which Mrs O'Huiggins said was the ideal time to serve breakfast - she'd been to Mass that morning, along with probably every other non-tourist inhabitant of Dingle. We ate, and then packed. Mrs O'Huiggins' ginger cat came in to help Pip and I in a catty sort of way, by sitting on every item of clothing we needed to put away.



We said our goodbyes to Mrs O'Huiggins, who had expressed appalled surprise at the idea of anyone wanting to visit Tipperary county, which was our next destination. Nigel had simply laughed when we told him, and other people had made "hmmm" noises. Somehow, I get the impression Tipperary has a bad reputation... we were going, though, largely because mum and I wanted to see the place where such a lot of our family history had originated. (Trust our ancestors to pick a place like that, hey?)

The roads were even windier than the day before, with lots of blind corners. Our fellow drivers paid no heed, however, overtaking with metres to spare. A couple of times we had to pull out around oncoming tractors that were trimming the hedges. Meanwhile, it was pouring with fine, misty rain. We arrived in Ballyporeen unscathed, however, and strolled around the churchyard (no relevant headstones. Looks like our family were too poor to afford anything but a grave. I'm only assuming they were buried in the churchyard...). Ballyporeen's main street was sadly uninspiring on a grey, rainy Sunday, but perhaps it's always been that way. We know that part of the family moved to England within a few generations to escape the potato famine - they turn up in census records in some of the most notorious slums in London a few years later. I imagine even that was preferable to the alternatives back home, though. Seeing the historic "workhouses" in Ireland had been chilling.



We set off again, looking for somewhere to stay the night. There was a loo-dash in Micheltown that was nearly doomed to disaster when the public auto-loo turned out to be closed, but the local supermarket took pity on us, and we bought biscuits in gratitude. We stopped in a place called Cahir, because one of the places in the main street promised rooms with a view of the city's castle ruins, but the woman in the shop below was prickly and the prices were too high for us. Again we set out, and drove to Cashel. Dusk was settling, and we were getting a little desperate after driving down so many one-way streets offering fleeting glimpses of bed and breakfast rooms in the wrong direction. At last mum stopped the car and sent dad and I to ask at the first B & B we came to, which turned out to be Ashmore House. We knocked on the sunny yellow door, and were let into a hallway with the most amazing collection of tourist paraphernalia I have ever seen. The stuffed squirrel caught my eye first; see if you can spot it in tomorrow's photo. The first price the woman offered us was again too high, but remembering what Nigel had said ("always, always haggle!"), dad made his face fall expertly, and we moved as if to apologise and leave. Instant price-cut! We were shown the proposed rooms, and it was a deal. Nigel, wherever you are - you are brilliantly evil.



Ashmore house turns out to have been Cashel's priests' house, and was built in 1730. It's a wonderful building, with creaky stairs and big bay-windows. The owners Laura and Brendan have done the interior up to match, but with the strange addition of all their thousands of souvenirs - Brendan used to be a merchant sailor, and has been all over the world. There are the tackiest sort of Japanese ceramics and plastic boomerangs all over the walls, along with stuffed death-adders and garishly-painted Indonesian carvings. Needless to say, it was a fascinating place to stay. And found by mistake, not design!

After we'd dumped our stuff I sat downstairs and checked my email, to discover to my horror that an old friend is having fairly major brain surgery in January, while I'm still away. There was other news as well, but that piece dominated in a hideous way. The four of us set out for a rather subdued dinner at a too-modern Irish pub, Kearny's gate hotel. The food was delicious, but my mind was on other things. It's awful to be utterly powerless to do anything for someone in that position until after the fact. The soonest I can see her is a couple of weeks into the recovery period. Arrrrgh.

I spent the rest of the night chatting with Pat over the internet, the both of us trying to tease out the details of his new idea about joining the police force. End result was that I got to bed very late, but much reassured about at least ONE piece of news from back home...