Cashel to Dublin

Breakfast at 8 o'clock was one glorious banana, lashings of smoked salmon on scrambled eggs, and a veritable bucket of tea which I managed to spill on Laura's nice tablecloth. Butterfingers...

We all packed, and Pip and I had a last-minute scramble when we thought we'd lost the key. It turned up underneath her suitcase, however, so we returned it and set off to see the sights of Cashel. Laura had recommended the Bishop's palace, and Cashel castle, the "Rock of Cashel".

We walked through the gardens of the Bishop's palace, which were splendid even in winter. Winding pathways took us through immaculately-kept lawns, spotted with piles of raked leaves. We reached the back wall only to find that the gate to the Rock had been locked. We tried at a few breaches in the stonework, but failed to scale the wall.



That forced us back into the township, though, which made for a nice walk through some of Cashel's houses and shops. We were amused to see the way "tourism" still works in parts of Ireland - this sign was next to the gate of a ruined cathedral:



We climbed up the road to the Rock of Cashel, which was spectacular. Alas, no time to go in - but we got a good look at the outside. You must be able to see for miles and miles from the tops of the walls and towers.



We strolled back to Ashmore house again, stopping to look in more shop windows, and being greeted by cats. Back at the house we said our goodbyes to Laura and Brendan (talkative people, and lovely), and we set out in the car yet again. No hardship, though, because the roads were much easier. We stopped halfway back to Dublin to walk along a canal covered by houseboats, every one with its own little idiosyncrasies. Potplants, for instance:



Mum and I decided the best colour for any dream-houseboat was shiny red, though she thought she'd like gold edging along hers as well. It was cold (for us), so we crossed over to the Bridgewater hotel and had hot chocolate and a bowl of wedges to share. Then it was back into the car for the last stretch to Dublin.

Once we arrived we returned our faithful hire care, and caught a taxi across the city to Barry's hotel for another night. Dad and I formed a delegation to the laundromat soon after we arrived, and then I set out alone to explore the streets of Dublin for myself. It's a big, lively city, and hard not to like. I wandered for 5 or 6 kilometres by my best guess, taking detours down alleys full of Christmas shoppers, and strolling along the shops near the Liffey. The only shop I actually went into was a sort of "alternative" bookshop. You know you've not walked into a particularly commercial venture when you're greeted by walls of poetry, Irish mythology, philosophy and the edgier classics... and when the "popular fiction" is hidden down the back and contemptuously marked "3 for the price of 1". The philosophy section was marked only by a label that said "Big Ideas". This was my kind of bookshop. I wanted to buy a rather large book that said it was a sympathetic history of the Fenians, but it was outside my budget. Hell, I wanted to work in the place! I bought a birthday present for my friend C, and hurried out before I saw anything else too wonderful to pass up.

Down the street from the bookshop I flirted briefly with the temptations of the Dublin Wool Mill (beautiful cloaks! Ultra-snuggly jumpers! ...Exorbitant prices!) before hurrying away again. By now it was dark and most of the shops were closing, and I had strayed into slightly shadier backstreets. I consulted my map and returned to our hotel.

Soon after everyone got back (dad from the laundromat, and the others from an internet cafe), we went out for dinner on O'Connell Street at Murray's Bar, where the others had eaten the night I was sick. I ordered delicious Limerick ham, and this time managed an entire pint of Guinness on my own. Sadly, I have developed a taste for it - sad, because everybody (except the breweries) agrees Guinness outside Ireland isn't worth the effort. Once we had toddled back to the hotel, Pip made me walk in a straight line along her scarf to prove I wasn't tipsy...

...And the cow had laid down her scarf in a curve!

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...