Month: April 2016

We experienced all four seasons in Cork today – with only minutes between bursts of sunshine, rain falling as sleet, grey overcast clouds and bright blue skies.

We walked the centre of Cork visiting the Gaol, St. Anne’s and St. Mary’s Churches on the north side of the River Lee.

We climbed the bell tower of St. Anne’s Church to capture views across Cork to the hills beyond in all directions. Along the way to the top we were able make “music” by pulling on the bell ringer cords following number sequences printed on laminated sheets.

After lunch we crossed onto the south side of the river to visit Red Abbey, Elizabeth Fort, St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral and finishing at the University College Cork.

A fire destroyed much of Red Abbey’s structure in 1799. All that remains today of the structure is the bell tower of the abbey’s church.

The original Elizabeth Fort was built in 1601 of timber and earth but within a few years was pulled down by the citizens of Cork fearing that the fort would be used against them by James I during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. It was rebuilt in its current stone and star configuration from 1624 to 1626.

 

St. Fin Barre is Cork’s Anglican Cathedral situated in the centre of the city. Consecrated in 1870, the Cathedral lies on a site where Christian worship has been offered since the seventh century. You can see St. Fin Barre in the image taken from St. Anne’s Church bell tower (above).

We finished our walking tour of Cork strolling through the grounds of University College Cork. There was a pleasant mix of old and new with prefect lawn quadrangles, colourful flower beds and vine covered buildings.

Today we visited Blarney Castle and the coastal village of Kinsale. Blarney Castle is contained within the larger Blarney Estate along with Blarney House and many acres of maintained gardens. We climbed to the top of Blarney Castle but did not kiss the Blarney Stone. Many others did but as I’m currently carrying the “bad cold germs” it seemed like the right thing to do was not to deposit my germs on top of several million other layers of germs provided by previous kissers.

The walk around the grounds was very relaxing – as not many people bother to enjoy the grounds. They appear to be bussed in, herded to the top of the Castle to have their kiss captured by a camera and whisked back to the bus with just enough time to buy the aformentioned picture from the gift shop on the way out.

We enjoyed a fresh sandwhich overlooking Blarney’s village green before driving out to Kinsale, a lively coastal village with a busy harbour.

To finish our day we enjoyed a meal with Owen and Heather Sillett at a very nice restaurant in the centre of Cork. Owen works for Honeywell and spent about four years working for Honeywell Australia in Brisbane before relocating back to Ireland at the end of 2014. I’d worked with Owen on a number of projects in Australia and it was great to catch up over a meal. Owen and Heather both work from their home in Cobh with their three young children. Heather is a customer service representative for Apple. I was amazed at the effort she had to endure in order to complete her job application and interview for the position. Apple appears to be fastidious with their employee selection process.

Tomorrow we will be doing a walking tour of the centre of Cork and hoping the weather will be as good as it was today.

Our transit from Waterford to Cork along the coast was very pleasant with lots of sun. Along the way we visited pretty coastal villages and viewed green fingers of headland dipping gently into the ocean.

We stopped for lunch at the delightful coastal village of Cobh where St. Colman’s Cathedral contains the only church carillon in Ireland, which with 49 bells, is one of the largest carillons in the British Isles. Every 15 minutes you get to hear a few of them in action. You’d never be able to tell your Mum you forgot what time it was when you returned home late from playing at your friend’s house.

For the last few days travelling in the car, we’ve been listening to podcast episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage. Today’s podcasts were extremely interesting; “Maths of Love and Sex” and “What is Reality”. From the latter episode I learnt some new information about how the brain works;

1. Auditory processing consumes more ‘brainpower’ than visual processing.
2. Visual processing is suspended when you move your eyes or blink. This means that your eyes are only feeding data into the visual cortex for about 85% of the time.
3. Visual inputs are processed as updates to a model of the world your brain is continually creating. Your eyes are glancing about grabbing ‘images’ which are being added to this model continually.
4. Input data from the various sensory subsystems are processed at differing speeds and consequently the brain has to mash these inputs together to produce a synchronised version of reality; think lip-synching. The processing delay of converging these inputs is estimated to be about 500 ms. This means that our ‘conscious’ world is continually half a second behind the ‘real’ world.

This is not the place to describe what was discussed in the “Maths of Love and Sex” episode but suffice to say it was just as illuminating as “What is Reality”. 🙂

The sun was shining brilliantly as we drove to the nearby coastal village of Tramore. The water along the coast near Waterford is the Celtic Sea which is part of the Atlantic Ocean. It was very placid and crystal clear.

We found a number of hidden coves where bathing platforms had been fashioned using cement allowing safe access for summertime water frollicking. Blocks with mounting holes where diving boards would be fixed providing opportunity for extra fun. Later on in the day, a local tour guide assured me that the best day in summer can get to 25 degrees C. What a hardy bunch these Irish folk are!

After a walking tour of the Waterford town centre we toured the Waterford Crystal factory. I had expected a lot of the processing steps from molten glass to finished product would have been automated, but this is not the case. Every step is manual, performed by master craftsman working by hand and eye. (There actually were two automated cutting machines in use but these were for specific items that are really too large, and heavy, to be processed manually with safety.) The tour wound through the actual factory working area where you can see work proceeding in various areas – blowing, cutting, finishing, engraving, polishing, etc. The programme to be a master craftsman is upwards of eight years of on the job training. There were a couple of younger fellows but most of the workers were 20-30 year veterans.

We finished the afternoon with a visit to Reginald’s Tower which has stood proudly in various forms for a little over a 1,000 years. Waterford is the oldest city in Ireland, founded in 914 by marauding Vikings.

Today we explored the three towns of Clonmel, Cashel and Tipperary. Alas, Waterford doesn’t have an ANZAC dawn service or a cenotaph so we had to commemorate ANZAC day in our own way.

The Rock of Cashel, also known as Cashel of the Kings and St. Patrick’s rock is located at Cashel, County Tipperary. The “rock” consists of a spectacular group of medieval buildings set on an outcrop of limestone including a 12th century round tower, High Cross and Romanesque Chapel, 13th century Gothic cathedral, 15th century Castle and a restored Hall of the Vicars Choral. During our visit, scaffolding was in place to support ongoing restoration of the Cormac Chapel.

On our way back to Waterford we visited Tipperary – because you have to if you’ve come all this way. 🙂

We visited Mount Congreve Gardens during our transit from Kilkenny to Waterford. The gardens would only be open for this one day while we were nearby in Waterford so it would be today or never. The gardens consist of around seventy acres of intensively planted woodland and a four acre walled garden. The entire collection consists of over three thousand different trees and shrubs, more than two thousand Rhododendrons, six hundred Camellias, three hundred Acer cultivars, six hundred conifers, two hundred and fifty climbers and fifteen hundred herbaceous plants.

Unfortunatley I was succumbing to my usual round of mid-trip sickness and was not feeling particularly like walking among the spring blossoms.

When we arrived in Waterford I rested on the bed while Chris explored the town and went in search of a chemist. She returned several hours later with happy snaps of the water front and some medicine for me.

Kilkenny Castle dominates the High Town of Kilkenny city. It has existed in various forms for eight centuries.

It was presented to the people of Kilkenny in 1967 by Arthur, 6th Marquess of Ormonde (1893-1971) for a consideration of 50 pounds.

The Office of Public Works began significant restoration of the building in 1979 and it is mostly complete with many of the original features, fabrics and carpets having been recreated based upon designs found on record or samples found hidden beneath wall fittings. The picture gallery is the second longest hall in Ireland. (Second only to the library hall at Trinity College in Dublin where the Book of Kells is housed.)

In the afternoon we drove to Carlow and parked in a gated, secure car park. Upon our return to the car after visiting the town, I discovered I had lost the parking ticket. A passing local expressed a morbid feeling of impending wrath that I should have lost the ticket and that it would likely lead to a prison term. At least I got no response from the “press here for help” button on the ticket machine.

We retraced our steps through the town and luckily found the ticket on the floor (trampled) in the shop where we had stopped to satiate Chris’ desire for salt and vinegar chips. With some smoothing applied and sufficient Euro coins we zipped out of Carlow before the pious local returned with his posse ready to take us into custody. (Note to self – in future give Chris all important tickets for safe keeping.)

Once the medieval capital of Ireland, Kilkenny has a rich heritage visible through its narrow streetscapes, historical buildings and landmarks. Butler House was once a dower house to Kilkenny Castle and was home to the Earls of Ormonde. You can stroll the manicured lawns and garden but the house is off limits to tourists. 🙁

St. Canice’s Cathedral was built in the 13th century. The round tower, built in the 9th century, is only one of two medieval round towers in Ireland that can be climbed – which of course, we did.

In the afternoon we programmed the GPS to take us to Bagenalstown to visit Maureen and Tom Doyle who are distant relations to Chris from Carl’s side of the family. We located the house and found some builders working on the roof who said Maureen was away at the shops and that she’d be back within the next hour. We decided to push on to the cemetery at Dumphrea to see if we could locate the final resting place of some even further distance relatives. We found the graves of Laurence & Mary Nowlan and many of their children. We spent some time picking out weeds and cleaning up the grave plot before returning to Maureen’s house.

Maureen was home when we returned and we discovered that her husband Tom had passed away over six years ago. She was very generous and hospitable to unannounced strangers purporting to be distant relatives from Australia. We enjoyed tea and scones and poring over her collection of family photographs. She is 81 and as sharp as a tack. She was able to recall every grandchild and great-grandchild without missing a beat.

Just as we were leaving she gave us the contact details for her brother Edward (Cork), sister Theresa (Limerick) and brother John (Galway). We shall see if our itinerary is able to extend to take in more relative sites.

In the evening we enjoyed some traditional Irish music during our meal at a local pub. Later, a five piece band setup and got the pub jumping with some great rock and roll favourites starting out with a couple of Prince retrospective covers. There were at least two hens night groups who had reached a level of inebriation that made for some fun watching their antics on the dance floor. We left the pub after midnight disappointed we couldn’t have stayed longer as the band was really, really good.

For the balance of our Irish adventure we are driving, so this morning we caught the light rail and dragged our bags to the car rental agency to collect our car. Despite having a prepaid booking with all options pre-selected, we still had to endure almost 45 minutes of “would you like to upgrade this”, and “insure that”, and “your windscreen will certainly be smashed to pieces and your tyres slashed if you go to Kerry”.

We eventually completed the transaction and merged into the Dublin traffic having decided to stop at Glasnevin Cemetery on our way out of Dublin. The first burial in Glasnevin was in 1832 and since then more than 1.5 million people have been interred or cremated there. There are more people buried in Glasnevin than are walking around Dublin today. There are many areas of communal burial within the cemetery – mostly due to mass outbreaks of cholera and the plague. One cholera burial pit contains over 12,000 bodies.

The cemetery was founded by Daniel O’Connell who wanted to provide a non-denominational burial site for Dublin’s citizens. Daniel was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century. He campaigned for Catholic emancipation – including the right for Catholics to sit in the Westminster Parliament, denied for over 100 years – and repeal of the Act of Union which combined Great Britain and Ireland. He and six of his direct descendants are buried above ground in lead lined coffins stored in the family crypt upon which stands a very tall, round tower.

The cemetery contains most all of the several hundred combatants and innocent civilians killed during the 1916 Easter Rising. The ring leaders who were tried and executed were initially buried elsewhere in unmarked graves but have since been relocated to Glasnevin.

Michael Collins’ grave is the most visited grave in the cemetery and is always decorated with flowers. Our tour guide said people travel from all round the world to deliver flowers and to pay their respects. Collins was a soldier and politician who was a leading figure in the struggle for Irish independence in the early 20th century. He was shot and killed in an ambush in August 1922 during the Irish Civil War. His popularity is likley due to his charming good looks and a life cut short in its prime with the burgeoning promise of a statesman like legacy.

We set off for Kilkenny driving along the coast enjoying views of the Irish Sea between dodging oncoming vehicles along the narrow and winding road. Wicklow was a cold and windy outcrop.

Chris was not able to be persuaded to go for a swim in the Irish Sea. The beach was covered with coarse sand and the rocks upon which Chris is standing (below) were flat and would have made fabulous skip stones had we been brave enough to go anywhere near the water. And had we tried to skip these across the sea, they would surely have reached England as (again) the Irish Sea was unbelievably flat. No chance of any surfing on this beach.

We walked to Kilmainham Gaol this morning excited about the opportunity of being locked up for a few hours but were disappointed to find all the tours for the day were already booked out. 🙁

So we returned to the city centre and visited Trinity College and the National Gallery before heading out to take up a romantic booth in one of the many Temple Bars to enjoy some live music and a refreshing drink.

It had been my cunning plan to book the final tour of the day at the Guinness Brewery in the hope of being able to drink the leftovers. The tour is about 90 minutes, self-guided and very informative, winding in a circular loop up seven levels till you reach the Gravity Bar with stunning 360 degree views of Dublin. Towards the end of the tour you get to sample some of the stuff and fortunately for me, Chris doesn’t like beer so I got her pint too – but through some dilation in space-time, we’d been turned Alice like into giants – making the drinks considerably less impressive. The mist in the following image is coming from the flux capacitor enabled time machine circuits cooling down after warping space-time with a short power burst of 1.21 gigawatts.

The black Guinness proved to be more potent than I had recalled and before long I was feeling disoriented. Christine appeared to me in a strange alternate reality.

We drifted home from the brewery for our last night in Dublin before moving onto our next Irish adventure in Kilkenny.