tours – Traveling

Castles, Churches, Loughs, and Rain

Up early this morning for another tour, this one of Trim Castle, Glendalough, and Lough Tay. It started raining last night, and continued through much of the day. Sometimes the rain faded back for a bit, and once or twice it picked up a fair bit, but the day was very like a lot of days on my last trip.

I am very impressed with our tour guide, Damien O’Reilly. He was very good at imparting the information of the tour in an entertaining manner, but that was the least of the good things about him. He was excellent at putting things in context, and forming connections between historical and modern events, and generally giving us a bit of understanding about where Ireland is and how it got there. I found it fascinating.

The early part of the tour went north of Dublin, to Trim Castle. There were only five people on the bus, so it felt like a private tour, and that was great. We picked up more in the afternoon, for the Glendalough part of the tour, but Damien was great at making everyone in the larger crowd feel included, as well.

Trim Castle was one of two castles used in the filming of Braveheart. It was the stand-in for York, and the grounds were used for London in the execution scene.

There were donkeys in a nearby field. Apparently, there's a donkey sanctuary nearby. — There were donkeys in a nearby field. Apparently, there’s a donkey sanctuary nearby.

Damien was kind enough to take a picture of me at Trim.

The gatehouse led into the town, and contained the dungeon. It even had an oubliette.

The keep is unusual - it's a square central building, with four (now three) smaller square towers, one attached to each central face. The northern tower, thought to have contained the food stores, has collapsed. — The keep is unusual – it’s a square central building, with four (now three) smaller square towers, one attached to each central face. The northern tower, thought to have contained the food stores, has collapsed.

The outside of the barbican was spruced up to be the gates of York in Braveheart.

Inside the barbican, you can see where wooden floors have long since rotted away.

The river gate opens onto the banks of the Boyne River. The lower sections, where the gate out was, are mostly buried.

Most of the floors are gone inside the castle. A few have been replaced, and some walkways built.

The original great hall on the entry level has models of the castle in each of its three phases of construction. The models are white, because the castle was originally finished with plaster and whitewash.

As is true of almost every castle I've been in, the stairs are narrow, uneven spirals. — As is true of almost every castle I’ve been in, the stairs are narrow, uneven spirals.

This was the solar. At least, during the middle stage of construction, before the third floor was added.

The little cubbyhole in the chapel wall had a little depression in it that filled with rainwater from the water collection system of the castle. The water would be blessed, and any leftover would be let out a drain in the bottom to return to the earth.

Up on the roof, there's a great view of everything. This is the town gate from the roof. — Up on the roof, there’s a great view of everything. This is the town gate from the roof.

From the roof, you can see a bridge across the Boyne and the Yellow Steeple, one of the tallest surviving medieval structures. To the left of that is a house where Jonathan Swift used to live.

The Sheep Gate is the last surviving gate into the walled city of Trim.

One of the river god statues so prevalent in the southeast of Ireland. This is the Boyne.

A bog-oak statue called Hunger for Knowledge. It features the salmon of knowledge, and is carved with various mathematical and scientific formulae. Obviously a modern work, but very cool.

After Trim Castle, we went back through Dublin, picked up the folks who had just signed up for the Glendalough leg of the tour, and then headed out south of the city into the Wicklow Mountains.

Glendalough had a thriving monastic community from about the 6th century up to the 13th century. These are the gates leading into the monastic city.

Just inside the gates is a stone inscribed with a cross. This is the Sanctuary Stone. In medieval times, if you were in trouble, and you could get to the monastery and touch the stone, you were granted sanctuary for up to 90 days.

There are a number of Celtic crosses in the cemetery. This Victorian one is particularly nice.

The main feature of the surviving monastic structures is the 10th century round tower.

This cemetery, like many in Ireland, contains a lot of yew trees. These were planted here because they are toxic to wildlife, and it kept the shallow graves from being dug up by scavengers. There are few other yew trees in the country - they were depleted by the Anglo-Normans who wanted them for longbows. — This cemetery, like many in Ireland, contains a lot of yew trees. These were planted here because they are toxic to wildlife, and it kept the shallow graves from being dug up by scavengers. There are few other yew trees in the country – they were depleted by the Anglo-Normans who wanted them for longbows.

This church was built around the 10th or 11th century. The windowsill on this wall served as the altar.

This stone was probably used as a mortar by the pre-Christians who lived in this area before the arrival of St. Kevin. Such a stone would be used primarily for grinding herbs for medicine by the holy men/women of the clan. It was taken to be the cornerstone of the new church here.

This is the view of the Glendalough site from across the little river, as I start up the trail towards the two loughs.

The valley runs a long way down. The name Glendalough means Valley of Two Lakes.

I'm walking the other direction up the valley towards the loughs. There are a few houses on the far side of the valley, despite the fact that this area can get isolated pretty quickly by either snow or flooding. — I’m walking the other direction up the valley towards the loughs. There are a few houses on the far side of the valley, despite the fact that this area can get isolated pretty quickly by either snow or flooding.

The trail up the valley is very picturesque, with the occasional whitethorn tree.

The bus was waiting for us between the first and second loughs. By the time I got there, it was raining hard enough that I didn't walk up to the upper lough. — The bus was waiting for us between the first and second loughs. By the time I got there, it was raining hard enough that I didn’t walk up to the upper lough.

Damien took us one other place, though he was worried that the clouds and rain would keep us from seeing what he wanted to show us. He needn’t have worried.

Lough Tay is owned by the Guinness family. As a wedding present for one of the women marrying into the family, they bought an estate at the edge of this lough, and imported sand to make the dark lough water look like a pint of Guinness with a head.

This is the Guinness estate. You can kind of see the house in the trees. Apparently, a movie company is getting ready to film something in the area - there were signs of construction down by the edge of the lough. — This is the Guinness estate. You can kind of see the house in the trees. Apparently, a movie company is getting ready to film something in the area – there were signs of construction down by the edge of the lough.

The cloudy day had some benefits. The clouds trailing down the side of the mountain were pretty cool.

Then it was back to Dublin. I wandered around Grafton Street and O’Connell Street for a while, having some dinner and trying to decide if I still had the energy to go hear some music or something, and decided that I didn’t, so I came back to the guest house.

Tomorrow, my tour has been canceled. What I do instead is going to depend on the weather. If it’s dry, there are a couple of walking tours I can take. If it’s raining, I can hit some museums or maybe a movie. Either way, I’ll find something to do.

But first, I’m gonna sleep in a bit. Probably until 8:00. That’ll be nice.

Almost Ready

It’s less than a month until I leave for Ireland, and I think I’ve got most of the details of the trip nailed down. Which is good, because, as I said, it’s less than a month until I leave. Did I mention that I have less than a month before I go to Ireland? ‘Cause it’s less than a month!

I’ve updated my itinerary for this trip to reflect the fact that I’ve sorted out what I’m going to be doing. It’s pretty much locked down, now, though that’s less rigid this trip than on the previous one – there are more days where I’ve got some plans, but nothing that I’ve had to book. This gives me a little more freedom to do what I feel like doing, based on weather, how tired I am, and stuff like that.

The big block in completing this portion of the trip was sorting out what I was going to be doing in Killarney. I really wanted a chance to take the boat out to Skellig Michael, but – as I found out last trip – that’s a chancy proposition. Also pretty expensive, what with the taxi ride from Killarney to Portmagee, but that’s the lesser concern. Much as I want to see the Skelligs, I finally decided to play it a little safer; after all, I really wanted to take the tour up through the Gap of Dunloe and to see Dingle and Slea Head, and those were more guaranteed things.

So, that’s what I booked. I’ve decided that, if I want to see the Skelligs, I’m going to have to book a week or so in Portmagee to have a good chance. Maybe rent a car, so I can tour the Kerry countryside on the days I don’t go out in the boats. Guess that means another trip to Ireland. What hardship!

Once that was done, I booked the tours in Killarney, and found a ghost tour I can take one night, as well. Those, coupled with the nice walks in and around the town, should keep me happily occupied for my two full days there. Then it’s on to Kilkenny.

After doing a fair bit of research online and sending about a half-dozen e-mail messages to various places in Kilkenny, I picked out three definite things I want to do there: take a walking tour of the town, head out north of town to Dunmore Cave, and head out south of town to Kells Priory. For the trips out of town, I contacted Kilkenny Taxi, and got some price quotes, which are quite reasonable, so that’s how I’m going to do that.

I haven’t actually booked anything, because I don’t really need to for this part of the trip. That means I can decide on the days in question when I want to go where – with the exception that I need to do the walking tour of the town on the Saturday, as it doesn’t run on Sunday. But if weather is rough, then I can head out to Dunmore Cave in the afternoon, or if it’s nice, I can either walk around the town to see the things the tour didn’t cover, or head out south to Kells Priory.

I’m really pretty excited about Kells Priory. It’s open to the public, with no guides or tours or opening or closing times – it’s just a three-acre, twelfth-century ruin that you can wander around. It’s not on a lot of tour itineraries, and there is no convenient buses¹ to anywhere near the site, so most of the reviews I read of it featured the line, “We were the only ones there!” Which is awesome.

And after two days in Kilkenny, I hop the train back to Dublin for the last part of my vacation. I’ve got a few day trips booked out of the city, and I plan to make a little more extensive use of the Hop-On-Hop-Off bus tour than I did last trip, but I’ve left the evenings free, as well as my last two days in the city, so I can finish off the trip in a little more relaxed fashion than previously.

That said, there are a couple of evening things I want to look into in Dublin – there’s a storytelling dinner at The Bronze Head that looks like fun, and I want to try and hit a pub or two that I heard about on the Musical Pub Crawl last year for some music. I also want to revisit Kilmainham Gaol, and take a tour of Dublin Castle, Christchurch Cathedral, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and wander around Phoenix Park for a bit.

And then it’ll be time to come home.

Believe me, I looked! [↩]

One Step Closer

Well, actually a couple of steps.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been slowly firming up the itinerary for my 2013 Ireland trip. I’ve got all my accommodation booked, and most of the tours for Belfast, Doolin, and Dublin. I’m waiting on some answers before booking my Kilkenny tours, mainly to do with how one gets to Dunmore Cave from Kilkenny.

Killarney is a bit harder. I’m very torn. I’ve got two full days in Killarney, and three things I’d like to do. Each of the three things I want to do takes a day, so one of them has to fall by the wayside. Yes, I know I can shift things around, even now that I’ve booked my accommodations, but there are reasons for this timing¹.

So, the three things are:

Tour the Gap of Dunloe. This is an interesting trip, where you take a bus around through the Kerry Mountains, get out and either walk or ride²³ – pony or pony cart – up through the gap, and then taking a boat down through the Lakes of Killarney to Ross Castle and then busing back to Killarney.
Tour the Dingle Peninsula. This is a day trip, similar to the Ring of Kerry trip I went on last time, but around the Dingle Peninsula. Lots of rugged coastline, interesting archaeology, seeing Dingle Harbour, and cool stuff like that.
Boat trip out to Skellig Michael. This is what I had planned to do last time, when I stayed in Portmagee, but weather prevented the trip. Now, Killarney Taxi runs a service down to Portmagee to take people to the boats and bring them back again. It’s a little pricey, but not ridiculous considering the distance and the convenience. But everything is dependent on whether or not the boats are running.

If I decide that I really want to see the Skelligs⁴, I’ll be leaving things kind of up in the air, as I try and book a place on the first day and leave the second day clear in case the boats aren’t running. That means that I may be scrambling to get a spot on one of the other tours on the day I don’t take the Skellig trip. Possibly both days, if there’s no Skellig trip on either day.

I’m trying to decide if I can live with that and, if so, which of the other tours I’d take on the off day. That means no booking stuff in Killarney just yet.

I talked to some friends of my parents over the Christmas break. They used to live in Ireland, they gave me some good pointers of things to look for. I’ve found that a number of them – including the Avoca Handweavers – are covered in some of my day tours. Others, like the Lisdoonvarna fair, are at the wrong time of year, but I’ll at least be in the nearby area.

Last bit I wanted to mention: I was having some trouble settling on accommodation in Kilkenny. I had planned to stay at Butler House, which is the dower house to Kilkenny Castle, and right next door to it. But the more I looked at it, the more I was put off by the price. Eventually, I decided to check out some other B&Bs in Kilkenny. The first three I tried had no rooms for the days I was going to be in Kilkenny. My friend Chris⁵ said, essentially, that I’d be a fool not to splurge a little bit on Butler House, considering that it might be a long time before I went back to Ireland. I caved in and booked at Butler House, and am looking forward to staying there.

We’re in the home stretch as far as planning goes. I’m starting to look at my luggage, now, to see if I can reduce what I bring with me and have to lug around. I’ve got some plans.

Mainly, I want to be able to spend my birthday evening in a pub in Doolin listening to music, and don’t want to steal time from Kilkenny and Dublin. [↩]
I’m planning on riding, myself. [↩]
Not, you’ll notice, riding myself. Commas matter. [↩]
And I do want to see them. [↩]
“I’m good at spending Rick’s money.” [↩]

Why Not a Package Tour?

When I first started looking at a trip to Ireland, my initial idea was to take a bus tour. The reason for this was three-fold: first, it would give me a nice sampling of Ireland, letting me figure out which things I wanted to see if I came a second time; second, picking a tour was easier than building my own; and third, they are remarkably inexpensive for what you get.

After doing some research, I was surprised to see that the various tour companies offer about 85% the same tours. That is, Exploring Ireland and CIE Tours and Authentic Ireland Travel and the others offer mostly the same tours, with the same names, as each other, though each also seems to have one or two exclusive tours. Now this doesn’t really bother me, because there are still a large number of tours to choose from, but it did strike me as curious.

Once I got past that, I started looking at the individual tours. I knew I wanted to go for at least two weeks, so I looked at the longer tours more carefully. I finally picked out the Irish Odyssey Tour, and started looking at all the things on it. It hit more of the things I wanted to see than pretty much any other tour.

But it also, like all the other tours, had a number of things that I’m just not interested in. I’m mainly interested in the history and music of Ireland, less so in things like crystal, woollen works, horse farms, or Japanese gardens¹. I would rather not go to Belleek Pottery Factory, and instead spend a couple of hours at Dunluce Castle.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I was putting up with seeing a bunch of stuff I wasn’t interested in in order to see a few of the things that I did want to see. That made me more and more dissatisfied with the idea of taking a bus tour of Ireland, despite the good experience I’ve had with similar things². I came to the conclusion that I just have different interests than the target market of these tours.

Given that, the answer seemed to be to create my own tour. And that would take research. So, off I scampered to the book store, and loaded up on travel books for Ireland. Their advice was generally useful³ and, coupled with the list of things I knew I wanted to see based on my investigation of the package tours, I was able to plot out a list of must-sees, nice-to-sees, and might-sees.

One of the things that I discovered doing this research was that there are a number of small (sometimes large) tour companies that run day tours out of most of the major centres in Ireland. This makes it pretty easy to set up a few home-base stops, and to take day tours out from them to the interesting sites in the area, and lets me get some of the ease of package tours with the freedom and specificity of my own itinerary. Best of both worlds, really.

So, that’s why I decided to build my own tour.

Honestly, if I wanted to see a Japanese garden in a country other than Japan, I could stay in Canada. Not that I don’t expect the one in Ireland to be very nice, but I have no interest in it. [↩]
The bus tour I took of New York City several years ago was awesome, and some friends had taken a bus tour of Europe a few years back that they spoke very highly of. [↩]
I plan to do a post at some point about which books I used, and how useful each was. [↩]