You order the full Irish breakfast, you get the full Irish breakfast. Throw in some museli and then proclaim this the best bed and breakfast ever. And maybe it is. Irish sausage, also, is better than anything we have at home.
You see a lot of old stone buildings just sitting roadside here. Some of them are important, some are just old structures. Most of them don’t even have signs or notations on a map. They just are. That’s how old the place is, a few hundred years is nothing, and it could just be the place an old angry person lived for all you know.
Today we visited the Rock of Cashel. This was where the kings of Munster ruled for 600 years, from the 4th century to 1101, when it was given to the church. This is the view as you drive up:
Inside you see St. Patrick’s Cross, built in the 12th century in the Latin style. One side has a carving meant to depict the crucifixion, the other side has an abbot, possibly St. Patrick himself. The base of the cross is hollow and is believed to have been a storage and hiding place for valuables:
Here are a few of the artifacts they’ve discovered at the Rock, and dated back to the 12th century:
There is a cemetery at the Rock, still active. The local authorities tried to close it in the early 20th century, but the community decided to have a lottery and that allowed for a few more spaces for the residents and their children. Our tour guide said there are four or five people of that generation still living.
If you look off in the distance behind her you might just notice a chunk of rock missing from the mountain on the right. Local lore is that the devil was flying over Ireland, took a bite out of that mountain and dropped it here, forming the rock upon which the church sits.
This is the north transept, and, in the top left corner, the round tower. The north transept contains late medieval tombs and grave slabs.
Here’s The Yankee outside the north transept, with that round tower in the background:
A wider shot, looking from the west. There is scaffolding covering the east side as they slowly work to renovate the structure.
We heard cows mooing in the pastures down below us:
The weather changed from cold to windy to raining to sunny to warm all while we were at the Rock. Crazy weather.
See those holes in the walls? That’s how they built the building. They’d get to a certain level and then put a large piece of wood there and build around it. Then they’d cut the wood out and remove their middle aged scaffolding.
This is inside Cormac’s Chapel, a small Romanesque church that was was consecrated in 1134 and named for King Cormac. This is looking at the archway just in front of the altar:
The frescoes in Cormac’s Chapel, such as they are, are the oldest Romanesque wall paintings in Ireland. The earliest are dated to around the church’s building, so circa 1134, and have a simple masonry pattern. The later paintings, thought to date back to between 1160-70, are narrative scenes, including the Nativity. Scholars believe outside artists, perhaps from England or France, were brought in for the work. They were covered with whitewash during the 16th century Reformation and remained hidden until the 1980s. The lime used in the whitewash wiped out the rest.
That red patina comes from only one place in the world: Afghanistan. The church was spending some money to get the ingredients shipped all the way to Ireland.
This is standing under the altar’s archway and looking back into the church. It is a small facility, thought to have been used by Benedictine monks:
Looking into the altar itself, you can’t quite make out the apse vault. But you can see more of those heads carved into the arch. The thought is that they were used to ward off evil spirits from invading the altar.
The interior and exterior views of that transept:
I like to get artsy with doorways sometimes:
Two of the markers in the cemetery:
This is a view from the east side. I’ve cropped out all of the aluminium scaffolding, which is off the left margin. The Rock of Cashel is on a rocky plateau that rises 300 feet above the surrounding plain known as the Golden Vale of Tipperary.
Just off the plateau you can see the Hore Abbey, a Cistercian monastery. This dates back to the mid-13th century:
Changing it up a bit here. I took a lot of shots in the car as we drove around today. Here are two of them. After that, you’ll see a little video montage of the rest of more.
And this is Kenmare, where we checked into Virginia’s Guesthouse.
Downtown looks like this:
We had dinner at Foley’s Restaurant. The live music in the video above is from the performers we heard tonight. If you’re interested in our route today, it looked something like this:
A lot more tomorrow!
