Friday, September 5, 2003 (Celbridge - Republic of Ireland)
A long haul but we have to cross the country
sometime. Driving towards better weather. The High Crosses of Ireland. In search
of a prehistoric monument but was it really worth it? We now have Dublin in our
sites. Security can sometimes be a concern.
Day 177. The cross-country journey to Dublin
was never going to be easy. Sandy hates driving long distances and there was
going to be little to break up the journey for us today. I was not looking
forward to it. Since we decided not to spend the night at a campsite, we found a
spot to park on the outskirts of town. Unfortunately, the location I chose it
was close enough to the road for the brick to feel the effects of passing
vehicles. Each time a car of lorry would pass by, the whole van would rock just
a little as the wind vortices caught us. It didn’t bother me too much but
Sandy woke up in a bit of a bad mood. This could only turn out bad for
me.
The day started out bad with
overcast skies and light rain for the better part of the day. It looked so grey
and dull when we opened the curtains, in fact, that neither of us had much
enthusiasm for checking out the abbey ruins nor the nearby castle. Having seen
so many of these things in recent weeks, I think we are a little spoiled and it
would have taken a pretty spectacular castle to get us out into the rain. With
that in mind, we decided to get a good head start on our journey over towards
Dublin and so set off with that sole agenda in
mind.
Before we left, I took a good
look at the Dúchas Heritage map to see if we would pass anything worthwhile
and the only thing that was close enough to our near direct route to Dublin was
a place called Clonmacnoise. This is the site of a collection of early Christian
churches, round towers and high crosses that was situated right in the middle of
the country on the crossroads of a major road and the mighty Shannon River.
Since we would get there in time for lunch, it seemed like a good place to stop
en route.
The site itself is indeed
an impressive one and we spent well over an hour there despite the near
continuous light rain throughout the afternoon. Much like most of the
Dúchas Heritage sights we’ve visited, this one was well presented and
came complete with a very nice visitor centre complete. There was the usual
audio visual presentation, full-sized models and reconstructions, colourful and
interesting information boards hanging on the walls and, of course, busloads of
tourists. Over the past several months, we’ve come to realize that the one
nationality of tourists that we loathe the most are, in fact, the Dutch. For
some reason, the Dutch always seem to be the ones speaking the loudest
regardless of how many people stand between them. It’s almost like they
think they are immune to the attentions of anyone else in the room, perhaps
because they think that nobody around them can understand what they are talking
about. It may not bother other people but since I speak Dutch fairly fluently, I
seem to get quite irritated at having to listen to them all the
time.
After another hundred or so
photo between us, we had lunch in the brick whilst parked in the visitor centre
car park before setting off again. On the way down the winding country lanes
towards the main N6 road, Sandy happened to notice a brown sign that caught her
eye. All throughout the British Isles and Ireland, brown signs indicated places
of interest such as historical landmarks and so on. Here, they also indicate
such mundane things like B&Bs and hotels. This sign, however, indicated a
megalithic three stone monument. There are several of these throughout Ireland
and we had yet to come across one so we decided that the one kilometre detour
was not too much of an imposition. After all, we may never see another. They are
usually arranged with two stones supporting a third laid across the top, almost
like a mini Stonehenge type of arrangement. Curiously, this particular site was
not listed on any of our maps and we could very well have missed the sign to it
quite easily. It was only supposed to be one kilometre up a narrow country lane
but after a couple of kilometres or more, we came to a ‘T’ junction
and no more signs. We backtracked along the lane and eventually stopped at a
campsite to ask for directions. As it turned out, we weren’t that far from
the site. When we got there, we parked the brick and walked a hundred yards or
so down a winding footpath to get to the stones. Once we arrived, it was clear
why it was not more clearly signed and absent from any of our maps. All that you
could see was a large slab of stone of approximately one-meter square with some
grass and shrubs growing around it. The only stone that was visible was the top
one, we surmised, with the two supporting stones beneath the surface, completely
hidden from view by the greenery surrounding it. It was a disappointing sight,
especially since we’d gone through so much trouble to find it, but at
least we can say that we saw one of these very few and far between prehistoric
monuments.
Once we were on the road
again, we made remarkably good time and managed to get all the way over to just
West of Dublin to a town called Celbridge. We made this our destination for the
day since there was a historic mansion house that we intended on visiting. The
short stop we made just before reaching Celbridge to do a bit of shopping meant
that we were sufficiently late arriving at the historic site to miss the last
guided tour of the day. The Dúchas representative at the main entrance was
good enough to allow us to join the nearly completed last tour but the place did
look interesting enough to warrant us coming back tomorrow morning. In the
meantime, we’ve found a spot to park the brick near the entrance to the
site grounds and have since eaten dinner and watched the first few episodes of
DS9 season four.
The Dúchas
woman did tell us to avoid parking inside the site grounds since there are a
group of transients (gypsys for want of a better word) nearby and she was a
little concerned about security. There has been quite a bit of traffic along
this secluded avenue and we keep hearing the voices of a high-spirited groups of
people somewhere a couple of hundred yards or so away. Either this is the group
of transients or simply a nearby pub. Either was, tonight may prove to be an
interesting one.
Posted: Fri - September 5, 2003 at 01:19 PM