Car Hire UK

Things to do in Trujillo

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:32:00 +0000

Francisco Pizarro, who waged war on the Inca to win Peru for Spain, was born in Trujillo, the illegitimate son of a nobleman. A bronze statue of him astride a fiery steed, ready for battle (done by two American sculptors in the 1930s), dominates the pretty Plaza Mayor in the heart of the Casco V Viejo (Old Town). Trujillo's two other famous sons were Diego Garcia de Paredes, who founded another Trujillo in Venezuela, and Francisco de Orellana, the first European to explore the Amazon.

The Casco Viejo, perched on a granite hill above the modern district, is full of grand 16th-century mansions financed with wealth brought back from the new territories. Of particular interest is the Palacio de la Conquista, built by Pizarro's half-brother Hernando; it still contains busts of the explorer's family.

Check with the Oficina de Turismo for opening date. The 13th-century Iglesia de Santa Marta holds the tombs of some of the town's most prominent nobles, including Garcia de Paredes, and is also noted for its 15th to 16th-century Gothic altar; the church is open daily. Towering over everything is the impressive Moorish built Castillo de Trujilloa walk up to its ramparts at sunset gives a spectacular view over the town's rooftops. Open daily. No admission charge.

The people of Trujillo live much as they always has, tending sheep and goats and doing wash by hand. In the evening, the main square is an evocative place to sit and sip a glass of sherry before going on to dine at one of the town's several good restaurants.

Merida things to do

Founded by the Romans in 25 BC as Emerita Augusta, a colony for the emeriti (veterans) of the fifth and tenth Roman legions, Merida quickly grew to be the Spanish Rome, capital of the vast and powerful province of Lusitania. The Roman ruins are among the best in Iberia, with top honors going to the Teatro romano, a Roman theater built with seating for 6,000 by Agrippa, son in law of Emperor Augustus, shortly after the city's founding. In summer, classical plays and flamenco dances are performed here. Nearby is an anfiteatro romano, a Roman amphitheater that held 14,000 spectators.

The National Museum of Roman Art Merida

There's ample parking near the entrance. The Museo Nacional de Arte Romano, in a building forming part of the theater complex, not only is acknowledged to be the finest repository of Roman artifacts in Spain, but also has drawn kudos for its design. It incorporates a Roman road, discovered when the museum was being built in the early 1980s, and contains a superb collection of statues, glassware, pottery, coins, and mosaics.

It's closed Sunday afternoons and Mondays; admission charge. Two Roman houses near the theaters have been excavated, revealing an intricate water system and some fine mosaics. They're open daily, and charge admission. Other Roman remains include an exquisite Templo de Diana (Temple of Diana); the circus, used for chariot racing; the wellpreserved Arco de Trajano (Trajan's Arch); the Acueducto de Milagros (Milagros Aqueduct), the better preserved of two that served the city; and the 60-arch Roman bridge across the Guadiana, the longest bridge ever built in Spain. Information on the ruins is available at the Oficina de Turismo, located at the entrance to the anfiteatro romano. Closed weekend afternoons.

Merida's past as a Moorish fiefdom is best seen in the Alcazaba, a castle built during the 9th century using a Roman wall as part of its foundation. Inside this fortress, note the cistern, a fine example of sophisticated Moorish engineeringits construction assured the Moors a constant supply of water from the Guadiana. Hours are the same as for the Roman amphitheater; admission included in amphitheater ticket.

One last sight not to be missed in Merida is the Hornito de Santa Eulalia, a 17th century shrine in front of the church of the same name. The shrine is dedicated to a young girl who, according to local legend, was baked in an horno (oven) in the 4th century for spitting in the eye of a pagan official of the Emperor Diocletian rather than renounce Christianity.

The monuments of Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:06:00 +0000

A land of 10,000 tales and a 100,000 memories, Ireland is littered with cairns and forts, dolmens and abbeys, standing stones and high crosses, monastic hermitages and feudal castles, with the oldest dating back thousands of years. But though the earliest traces of early life here date from about 6000 BC, it was not until about 3000 BC that humans built on a scale large enough to leave memorials to themselves. Those that survive are tombs of a type known as court cairns long chambers divided into compartments.

The earliest structure that grips the visitor's imagination is the passage grave. Found in groups, each under a huge mound, these typically consist of a long passage leading to a central space onto which other chambers open on three sides, with a roof of large stones, one or more stone basins inside, and, on all the stones, great numbers of incised geometric motifs and even stylized human faces. The group in the Boyne Valley of County Meath, which includes the magnificent Newgrange, is striking.

Equally arresting are Ireland's great standing stones, or dolmens. Outlined against the sky, crowned by an enormous capstone, they were built in about 2000 BC, probably as tombs. Men in pubs call them beds of Diarmuid and Grainne, referring to the Irish king's daughter who, betrothed to the venerable giant Finn MacCool, eloped with the younger Diarmuid on her wedding night and slept in prehistoric tombs during a furious yearslong chase that ended with Diarmuid's death at the snout of an enchanted boar and the wayward lady's marriage.

Later, during the Bronze Age, at about the time the Celts arrived here, there were stone circles like the piper's stones of County Wick low, Where, it was believed, the little people played the bagpipes for dancers. Hill forts like Tara, the legendary dwelling of the high king of Ireland, came later, in the Iron Age, around 500 BC.

A hill fort's outer fortifications enclosed a large area, so the owner was certainly an important figure. Ring forts, of which there are some 3,000 scattered around the country, are smaller, ranging in scale from the Grianan of Aileach in County Donegal to the occasional odd shape in a field.

Christianity in Ireland

Christianity came to Ireland in the 5th century, and with it the nation embarked on an era of great building. Monasteries sprang up all over Ireland. Bearing little resemblance to their more modern counterparts, they consisted of simple clusters of stone huts and a sheltering wall, like those on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry and at Glendalough in County Wicklow. Round towers, also seen at Glendalough, were put up as refuge from Viking raids.

The devout also built crosses which at first were just cross-shaped slabs or slabs incised with a cross motif. Later came the increasingly more . ornate high crosses, which had geometric designs and even scenes from the Bible, with a circle around the intersection of the horizontal and vertical arms.

In the 12th century, Irish Romanesque architecture made its debut on the ecclesiastical scene. Examples like the Chapel of Cormac at Cashel, in County Tipperary, and Ballintubber Abbey, in County Mayo, show the distinctive signs: roundheaded doorways, fantastic animal and human masks in stone, with intertwining beard and tail, chevrons, and foliage decorating arches, doorways, capitals, and sometimes church windows.
The cathedral towns of Ireland

In the 13th century, Franciscans and Dominicans arrived with Gothic ideas in their saddle bags. In cathedral towns like Kilkenny, Kildare, and Limerick, many of the older parish church buildings still in use abound in lancet windows and other distinctive marks of the style. By the 15th century, the Cistercians had risen to the glories of Holy Cross in County Tipperary.

Meanwhile, a more durable class of fortress, the castle, was'developing. The Norman invasion sparked the creation of fortresses like Carrickfergus Castle, in County Antrim, and the round keep at Nenagh, in County Tipperary.

There was no stopping the masons and their masters of this period. Between 1450 and 1650 every family who was anyone built a castle. Very few of these structures disappeared entirely from the landscape, and some most notably Bunratty Castle in County Clare are in splendid shape.

Early architecture in Ireland

Whether ecclesiastical or secular, each type of building has its saga and its place in Irish history, and with a little imagination, they spring vividly to life when you visit them. Those listed below, in roughly the order in which they were constructed, include some of the most important and most colorful.

NEWGRANGE, Newgrange, County Meath, Irish Republic: Very few relics of the daily life of the people of the Neolithic Age (ca. 3700-2000 BC) survive in Ireland today; it seems as if all the creative energies of the communities of this period were directed toward the construction not of homes for the living but of monumental repositories for the remains of the dead, and the whole valley of the river Boyne, about 30 miles north of Dublin, is scattered with cairns, standing stones, and earthworks both large and small. Of these, Newgrange is the most impressive by far.

In fact, this passage grave ranks among the most important of its type in Europe, and scholars have spent centuries studying it. Literature of the ancient Irish links it to a mysterious personage who is sometimes called Oengus an Brogha (Oengus of the palace) and sometimes dubbed Oengus mac an Dagda (Oengus son of the good god); some archaeologists have suggested that Newgrange and similar tombs on the Continent were constructed for the important personages in groups of traders and prospectors who first migrated from Spain or Portugal around 4000 BC.

Certainly, they had a civilization far more highly organized than our widespread assumptions about our primitive ancestors would credit them at least if they are to be judged from the sophistication of the building and decorative techniques evidenced here.

HILL OF TARA, near Navan, County Meath, Irish Republic: Little but legend and a handful of earthworks and stones remain of the glories of Tara but of legend and conjecture there is plenty, and this 512-foot hill about 25 miles from Dublin, commanding a fine view of a vast expanse of lush meadows, is well worth a visit.

Already a significant burial place 2 millennia before Christ (as revealed by the excavation of one of the site's most notable monuments, the Mound of the Hostages), it ranked among Ireland's most important political and religious sites for almost 2,000 years. It became the center of priestly rulers even before St.Patrick came to Ireland in the 5th century and long served as a residence for anyone strong enough to make himself at least nominally High King of Ireland.

Tara enjoyed one of its most glorious periods in the first centuries after Christ, when the celebrated Cormac the Wise constructed the wooden palaces that are mentioned in some of Ireland's early literature. (It was his daughter who, though betrothed to Finn MacCool, eloped with Diarmuid O'Duibhne and gave rise to the wonderful stories about the lovers' flight from one end of Ireland to the other.) Later, after St. Patrick triumphed in a contest of feats with the druids of High King Laoghaire, whose authority the saint had challenged, the King allowed his subjects to be converted to Christianity (although he himself remained a pagan until his death).

Tara's importance declined until its abandonment in 1022. Relics of all of these eras can be seen today. The Mound of the Hostages (Dunha na n Giall), an early passage grave (ca. 1800 BC) with a l7-foot long corridor, covered by a mound that measures 72 feet in diameter, is at one edge of the large, circular Iron Age ring fort called the Royal Enclosure (Rath na Riogh), at whose center are two other earthworks the Royal Seat (Forradh) and Cormac's House (Teach Cormaic), where visitors will see a modern statue of St. Patrick and the 5-foot Iong chunk of granite known as the Stone of Destiny (Lia Fail). The latter, according to popular legend, would roar when the king being crowned upon it was acceptable.

Adamnans Stone is a 6-foot high chunk of sandstone bearing the incised likeness of a human figure perhaps the horned Celtic Cernunnos or a type of fertility figure known as a sheilanagig.

The Grianan of Aileach (the sunny place in the territory of Aileach), one of the most important antiquities in the northern part of the country, is among the most noteworthy. Perched atop 800-foot Gnanan Mountain, not far from Londonderry, this fortification measures about 77 feet acoss; the 13 foot thick walls, restored in the 1870s by the bishop of Derry to their height of I7 feet, contain galleries and guard chambers and enclose a series of stairway-connected terraces. The views afforded by the top look out over the blue reaches of loughs Foyle and Swilly, are glorious fully worthy of the O'Neills, the Kings of Ulster, whose northern branch made this fortification its base from approximately the 5th century AD through to the 12th.

Already badly battered In 676 during an attack by the southern O'Neills, under Finechta the Festive, the structure was finally destroyed by Murtogh O'Brien, the King of Munster, who, avenging the pillaging of his own residence, instructed each of his men to carry away a single stone of the fort.

The round shape has inspired the church nestling at the foot of the mountain at Burt, one of Ireland's most interesting modern structures. It was built In 1967 after designs by Liam MacCormick and Una Madden. Similar and equally impressive fortifications include Dun Aengus in the Aran Islands and Staigue Fort in County Kerry.

The earth mound that is the most immediately obvious feature of Newgrange, entirely man made, using alternate layers of turf and stones, is unusually Iarge 40 feet high and 300 feet in diameter; estimates put the quantity of stones required for the whole undertaking at 180,000 tons. Now covered with grass, the mound was originally paved with white quartz pebbles so that it glistened brightly enogh In the sun to be seen from afar (as indeed it does now, thanks to a careful restoratlon In the 1960s).

Inside, leading into the depth of the hill from the entrance on the southeastern frontage, is a 62 foot long, yard wide passage.

High enough to let a person walk uprght and lined with a series of orthostats, or upright stones, 5 to 8 feet high, It ends at a generally circular burial chamber, whose notable features include its beehive-shaped ceiling paved with overlapping stones (following a method of constructio found over and over again at Irish ruins of this period) and, adjoining the main chamber and giving the tomb's interior a roughly cruciform shape three recesses containing stone troughs or basins probably once used to contain the ashes of the dead. On the morning of the shortest day of the year, rays of sun shine directly up the passageway to the center of the burial chamber a design that required some sort of calendar to calculate.

The decoration throughout further confirms that sophisticated minds were at work. The ceiling of the north recess, covered with carved spirals, lozenges, triangles, zigzags, diamonds, and other shapes, is particularly noteworthy, as are the gigantic threshold stone, at the entrance to the tomb, and many of the orthostats.

Megalithic Stones Ireland

The fact that similar motifs appear on many other megalithic stones (and on Mycenean tombs as well) has prompted scholars to theorize that, far from being mere ornament, the designs, probably rooted in the pre-Mycenean civilization of the 3rd millenmum BC, are magnificent abstract representations of gods, goddesses.

GLENDAlOUGH, County Wicklow, Irish Republic: Nestled deep in the Wicklow Mountains about 30 miles south of Dublin, this valley of the two lakes is the beautiful setting for one of Ireland's important early Christian monasteries, particularly striking in May when the gorse is in full bloom. Born on the site where St. Kevin settled to renounce human love and live as a hermit during the 6th century, Glendalough, like many other Irish monasteries, was pillaged and sacked many times by the Vikings and assorted other marauders. Famous as a seat of learning, like Clonmacnoise, it was particularly vulnerable and, as at Clonmacnoise, the ruins are extensive: more than half a dozen churches, crosses, grave slabs, a priest's house, a round tower, and old wells.

The stone of which most of these are constructed, granite and micaschist, has chipped and crumbled over the centuries, giving the walls a rough texture and providing a fine medium for the growth of the pale, soft local lichen, so that the buildings at Glendalough have that particularly antique look that many folks imagine all ruins have until they find out otherwise.

It's certainly pleasant to spend a day here, poking around among the broken walls, wandering along the pathways between them, and admmng the glasssmooth waters of the upper and lower lakes. Especially noteworthy are the 7th-century cathedral, Ireland's largest pre-Romanesque church; St. Kevin's Church (popularly known as St. Kevin's Kitchen), with its round towerlike belfry rising up above a stone roof; the small, 12th-century Priest's House, perhaps originally a mortuary chapel or even the saint's shrine; the Reefert Church, around whose walls sleep many Leinster kings; and, farther down the valley, accessible via a narrow sylvan path, St. Saviour's Monastery, a 12th-century church probably built by Laurence O'Toole, former abbot of Glenda Lough, archbishop of Dublin, and Ireland's first canonized saint.

There are especially fine walks around the upper lake, which is picturesquely backed by the steep cliffs of 2,296-foot Camaderry and Lugduff Mountains, ribboned by the rushing Glenealo Stream and a waterfall.

ClONMACNOIS, Shannonbridge, County OHary, Irish Republic: Founded by St. Ciaran in the mid-6th century on a large, serenely beautiful site on a reed-edged curve of the river Shannon between loughs Derg and Ree, Clonmacnois has been plundered and burned by Vikings, desecrated by Danes, harassed by the Normans, and, much later, during the Dissolution, carried away, piece by piece. But until this consummate act of vandalism, it grew strong, flourished, and became the Oxford of medieval Ireland.

Fine manuscripts were created here, and some of the country's greatest scholars and intellects came here to live, pray, work, and be buried. What remains are the most extensive monastic ruins in Ireland: eight churches, two round towers, a cathedral, and a castle, as well as three high crosses, parts of two others, and more than 2000 12th-century gravestones vividly illustrating the many types of graves used in early Ireland.

Of all the structures here, the celebrated Flann's High Cross, carved with scenes of the Last Judgment and the Crucifixion, is exceptionally beautiful, and the Nun's Church, whose doorways have capitals crawling with fiercelooking beasts, has the most interesting story: This was where the pathetic Dervorgilla retired in penance after eloping with Dermot MacMurrough, the King of Leinster thereby setting off the Norman invasion.
Rising in lonely tranquillity above the lush green landscape, the ruins possess an air of peace and dignity, as befits a national treasure.

ROCK OF CASHEL, Cashel, County Tipperary, Irish Republic: Even in Ireland's earliest days, before any fortresses or cathedrals or castles were built atop this chunk of carboniferous limestone, the Rock must have looked a bit unreal, rising precipitously a block of slate gray above the surrounding rockstudded green plains. Now, capped by the spare and broken remains of structures once frequented by saints, kings, and bishops, the Rock provides a visual experience that is, quite simply, one ofIreland's most stupendous. The long time capital of the Kings of Munster, the Rock was visited In 450 by St. Patrick, who baptized King Aengus and his brothers.

Later, Brian Boru, who defeated the Norsemen in the Battle of Clontarf near Dublin in the 10th century, was crowned king here, and, though it stayed in the hands of his descendants, its political importance declined as its ecclesiastical significance grew; in 1101, it was presented by Brian's grandson, King Muirchertach, to the church, which is responsible for most of the buildings in the tightly grouped complex seen on the Rock today. These are as impressive when viewed at close range as they are from afar.

Dominating the group is the cathedral, begun in the 13th century and abandoned in 1749. The central tower offers fine views into the distant mountains and to the Devil's Bit the mountain pass said to have been created when the Dark Angel took a large bite. (The size of the Rock is said to match the void in the mountain exactly.)

A very well-preserved round tower, probably from the 10th century, stands at the corner of the cathedral's north transept; and the massive, rectangular, three-storied archbishop's palace, honeycombed with passageways to explore, adjoins the west end of the cathedral's nave, which was never completed. Nearby is the newly restored 15th-century Hall of the Vicars Choral, used to house laymen who participated in the chanting of the cathedral's services and now home to the 12th-century Cross of St.

Patrick, which was recently transferred to this site. Tiny Cormac's Chapel, wedged into a corner between the cathedral's choir and its south transept, is especially interesting. Built in 1127 by Cormac MacCarthy, the Bishop of Cashel and the King of Desmond (in the realm created after a defeat by the King of Connaught divided Munster in half), it is considered by many to be the nation's best example of the Irish Romanesque style, and volumes have been written tracing its origins.

Visitors are often most impressed by the elaborate carvings, the ribbed vaulting, twisted capitals, and richly embellished blind arcades; the tympana (the surfaces between the arch and the lintels) surmounting the south door through which visitors enter today, and the far grander north door, through which worshipers gained access to the nave until the construction of the cathedral, are strikingly beautiful.

The lions and centaurs seen here are even more exotic than the human heads that peer out from around the chancel.After completing a tour, don't fail to see some of the older structures in Cashel proper.

BALLINTUBBER ABBEY, Ballintubber, County Mayo, Irish Republic: The site of this Augustinian community has long been important; tradition tells us that St. Patrick baptized local peasants with water from its well. Later, the monastery became the departure point for pilgrimages to Croagh Patrick. Now it is noteworthy because Mass has been said in its church ever since the community's founding by Cathal Crovdearg O'Conor, the King of Connacht, for the Canons Regular of St. Augustine in 1216 despite the suppression of the abbey under Henry VIII and the depredations of the Cromwellians in 1653. That there has been no interruption in religious rites for over 760 years makes the church unique in the English-speaking world, and, in addition to its special history, it is also an exceptionally handsome structure.

Thanks to sensitive restoration work begun on the initiative of a former priest, Father Egan, and finished in 1966, a new wooden roof was constructed for the nave and the interior walls whitewashed in the ancient fashion, so that the church looks much as it must have upon its completion.

The carving around the three lancet windows in the gable and on the capitals of the chancel exemplifies the best work of a school of talented late Romanesque carvers who worked in the province of Connacht in the early 13th century after the rest of the country had adopted the Gothic style; and the Augustinians, who were more permissive than other orders, allowed the artists more latitude in their designs which the results reflect. The wonderfully monstrous snakes twined around each other on the capitals between the triple roundheaded window in the front of the church (to see them in those distant gloomy recesses requires field glasses) and the grotesque creatures creeping along the corbels that uphold the chancel's ribbed vaulting are just two examples.

Nearby is the well where St. Patrick did his baptizing, as well as the attractive cloisters reconstructed from the ruins of the 15th-century originals with the aid of fragments that came to light in the course of archaeological excavations in the 1960s.

CAR RENTALS IRELAND

There is so much to see and do in Ireland that visitors should take their time to explore this intriguing and diverse land. The best and most economical way to get around Ireland is to hire a car from the airport. Airport car hire in Ireland, including Dublin Airport, Shannon Airport, Knock Airport and Cork Airport can be pre-booked before you travel to save you from delays and hassle when you arrive in Ireland.

MELLIFONT ABBEY, Drogheda, County Louth, Irish Republic: Near the banks of the narrow river Mattock, 6 miles west of Drogheda, are the meager, but moving and exceedingly graceful, remains of this abbey, Ireland's first of the Cistercian order. There are ruins of rounded chapels in the transepts of a church of continental European design, a fine 2storied chapter house with a handsomely groined roof in the Norman style, a tall, massive gate house, and other interesting finds, including a crypt under the abbey church, unusual for a structure built in 12th-century Ireland.

The whole complex, reputedly commissioned by St. Bernard of Clairvaux and consecrated with great pomp and circumstance in the presence of a papal legate in 1157, initiated a program of reform that quickly took hold and sprouted daughter establishments all over Ireland. At the time of the Dissolution, the abbey was acquired by Edward Moore, and from him it was passed on to the Balfours of Townley Hall, who never lived here. A century ago it was used as a piggery.

HOLY CROSS ABBEY, Thurles, County Tipperary, Irish Republic: Ireland certainly has no shortage of ruined abbeys, their gray silhouettes standing stark against the sky. But this one, on the shores of the river Suir, is among the country's most beautiful and best preserved. Founded in 1169 by Donal O'Brien, the King of Thomond, on the site of an earlier Benedictine property, it came into possession of a fragment of the True Cross that Pope Pascal II had given to the founder's father, Donogh O'Brien, the grandson of none other than Brian Boru, in 1110.

Because of the presence of this relic the monastery quickly grew, nurtured by gifts brought by the pilgrims who came in multitudes in the 15th and 16th centuries. The glory of the abbey today is its church, which was re-roofed with Irish oak and slate and otherwise restored for public worship beginning in 1971. It has magnificent stone carvings, lively Flamboyant traceries, an elaborately groined roof, and handsome windows and arches, along with one of the few wall paintings to be found in any Irish church.

(As befits the complex's setting in Tipperary's famous sporting country, the mural depicts a hunting scene.) The chancel, with its ribbed vaulting and fine east window, is considered to be among the best examples of 15thcentury architecture in Ireland.

CARRICKFERGUS CASTLE, County Antrim, Northern Ireland: Along with Trim Castle in County Meath, Carrick fergus Castle remains the mightiest symbol of the Norman presence in Ireland after the invasion of 1169. Situated strategically on the shores of Belfast Lough, it is one of Ireland's strongest castles, and its name repeatedly crops up at a number of important junctures in Irish history. Founded in 1180 by John de Courcy, the first Norman Lord of Ulster, it was besieged in 1210 by King John of England, who feared the rising independence of his Norman barons.

A century and a considerable amount of construction later, it fell to Robert the Bruce, whose brother Edward had invaded Ireland from Scotland in 1315, but it was returned to the Crown with the defeat of the Bruces a few years later. For nearly 3 centuries, it existed in comparative quiet and increasing decay. Then in 1690, William of Orange landed here during his campaign to defeat the Stuart kings for the possession of Ireland; some 70 years after that, it was taken by a French expeditionary force. In 1778, the American John Paul Jones, captain of the Ranger, defeated the HMS Drake, which was moored beneath the castle.

In the 18th century, the castle was used as a prison for United Irishmen and others. Visitors enter the impressive structure through a gate flanked by two rounded towers and then proceed through the outer ward past a handful of 16thcentury storehouses into the middle ward. Adjacent to the middle ward, the inner ward is dominated by the squarish keep 5 stories, about 90 feet high, 56 feet across, and 58 feet deep.

Inside the 8 foot thick walls is a stairway that climbs from the ground level (where there is an early 20thcentury steam engine and an antique wooden dugout canoe) to a group of military exhibits on the floor above and into the great chamber, a spacious room with large windows. Also worth a visit are the walled town's handsome late 18th century Town Hall and its Church of St. Nicholas, which dates from the 12th and 17th centuries and houses a not to be missed monument to Sir Arthur Chichester, who built the town walls and figured importantly in the establishment of modern Northern Ireland.

Fairs and festivals in Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:02:00 +0000

Feis and Fleadh: The Best Festivals With such a wealth of talent in so many fields, it's hardly surprising that Ireland should be blossoming with festivals. What is surprising is that, without ever depending on having warm and sunny summer weather, they take place virtually yearround and last anywhere from a day or a week to a month or two. Some are oddball events devoted to strawberries or the arcane mysteries of the uilleann (elbow) pipes, a type of bagpipes that use the elbow as a bellows to pump air.

Others are rooted in the European tradition of street musicians, buskers, and parades. Lisdoonvarna, in Clare, has a matchmaking festival in September, and Belfast an agricultural exhibition in May. There are rallies and angling competitions, horse shows and country fairs, and people stand around in their town's main square listening.

Listening to bands and ballad singers, meeting neighbors they might not have had a proper chance to speak to since the previous year's event. There is a very good reason for this abundance of festivals: During festival times, all bars are allowed to stay open later than usual (though in the cities, late night drinking, that great source of Irish joy is confined to a single appointed place). Consequently, the atmosphere is usually jolly, and there is generally a feeling that something is actually happening.

Music festivals in Ireland

Music festivals are abundant, though it should be said that some kind of music, traditional or popular, jazz or rock is part of every Irish festival worthy of the name. Cork holds an International Jazz Festival annually in late October; Dublin holds a Festival of Music in Great Irish Houses every June; and each year, there's usually a major rock musIc event held outdoors in a natural amphitheatre on the sloping banks of the river Boyne at Slane Castle, in County Meath, not far from some of the country's greatest archaeological treasures.

In addition, since Ireland is the home of U2, and a host of other international musical heavies, visitors might catch the latest planetary sensation doing a gig at a sports stadium in the provinces or at the Point theatre and Royal Dublin Society in the capital.

Rock events, in any case, are held mainly in June and July and can, if the weather is good, be very enjoyable. The same goes for the kind of event known in Ireland as afleadh cheoil (festival of music), which convenes almost every sumer weekend somewhere in Ireland. The festivals manage an extraordinary combination of 1960s bonhomie and the long-standing Irish tradition of playing musIc at fairs.

Whether it be the biggest of the breed, the All-Ireland Festival (the Fleadh Cheoil nah Eireann), which generally takes place the fourth weekend in August, or one of the smaller affairs, the experience is fairly unbelievable. Thousands of people, young and old, take over the host town. Guesthouses and hotels don't have a bed to spare, ordinary homes turn into lodging places, and the young put up tents. People drink in the streets, and day and night the music goes on and on.

Many of the best intepreters of Irish traditional music and dance show up for performances and competitions alike (so it is not all just drinking and carousing). The size of the throngs who come to listen and take part demonstrates once again how Irish traditional music has grown in importance and popularity over the last decade.

Dublin Airport car hire

If you plan to arrive at Dublin Airport, book a hire car to pick up from the airport before you travel. This will save you time and money when you arrive, and enable you to drive around the country to find the best Irish festivals being held in Spring or Summer.

When attending an Irish festival or fleadh. it is sensible to buy a program. But buy It as a souvenir, a reminder of the event attended, an aid to identifying some featured celebnty, even a place to take notes.
In certain Circumstances, the greater part of the attendance may decamp to another town in pursuit of music, or sImply, as they say in Ireland to explain doing practically nothing, for the crack.

FESTIVAL OF MUSIC IN GREAT IRISH HOUSES, near Dublin, Irish Republic: At this event, hear the best singers in stately Killruddery, in County Wicklow, just outside Dublin (described in Stately Homes and Great Gardens). Or enjoy a Handel opera in the beautifully restored Royal Hospital, at Kilmainham in Dublin.

Or hear the New Irish Chamber Orchestra in splendid Castletown House, a mere carriage ride from Dublin for the 18th-century magnate who built it. This festival doesn't just want to sell tickets it wants to provide music lovers with an opportunity to enjoy the period architecture, the damask curtains, a cool glass of wine in the paved hall during the interval, and the perfumes of the herbaceous border laid down by her ladyship years before.

FLEADH CHEOIL NA EIREANN, varying venues, Irish Republic: The All-Ireland Festival is the culmination of the traditional music year in Ireland. Staged In a different town each year, it brings great numbers of Ireland's musicians and singers together for 3 days to compete, to judge, to listen, and above all, to play and sing in concert halls, pubs, car parks, squares, and streets, to audiences numbering in the tens of thousands.

Total informality and sheer physical stamina are the order of the day.
Visitors are likely to find themselves footing out a handy polka on the macadam surface of some remote main street to fiddle music provided by a local doctor seated on an upturned beer keg. Don't worry they'll never believe it back home anyway!

FLEADH NUA, Ennis, County Clare, Irish Republic: A little more formal than the clamorous jollifications of the All-Ireland Festival, from which it sprang, this late May event showcases Irish musicians, dancers, and singers in a pretty little inland town with some nice Georgian houses and a ruined friary just a few miles down the road from Shannon Airport. Details: Minnie Baker, Fleadh Nua Office, Crusheen, County Clare, Irish Republic.

GALWAY INTERNATIONAL OYSTER FESTIVAL, Galway, County Galway, Irish Republic: This western seaboard city was colonized in the 16th century by Elizabethan Planters, but, in addition, the surrounding bays have always been famous for their oysters and scallops, and in recent years local agencies and fishing cooperatives have actually farmed them. So it's only appropriate that the big annual wing ding here, traditionally held during the last weekend in September, continues to attract thousands of visitors each year.

After all the cultural festivals, this is the place to come and relax. The festival begins with the Irish Oyster-Opening Championship, followed a couple of days later by the World Oyster Opening Championship, which draws participants from around the globe. Throughout the festival, yacht races, golf competitions, and other festivities take place. To conclude all these activities, head for the pubs of Clarenbridge, where many a tasty bivalve slips down an eager throat on a stream of foaming stout to the accompaniment of terrific Irish brown bread and sweet butter. Or take a boat or plane to the Aran.Or explore the city: Tudor doorways and coats of arms are still visible on many streets.

GUINNESS JAZZ FESTIVAL, Cork, Irish Republic: A magnificent razzle for the those passionate about their upbeats and downbeats, this popular event attracts such international luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald, the Heath Brothers, and Cleo Laine, and together with a circle of local swingers, they keep the joints jumping on both banks of cork's stately river Lee. Don't expect to get too much sleep, and try to book the more important events in advance.

KILKENNY ARTS WEEK, Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, Irish Republic: Established enough to have acquired a roster of unofficial goings-on known here as a fringe, this event, held at the end of August or the beginning of September, convenes in one of the most pleasant and prosperous of Irish towns, with the added advantage of several very comfortable hotels and a location that makes it feasible to drive down from Dublin (a matter of a couple of hours), have a drink in The Marble City or Tynan´s Bar, catch a lunchtime concert, browse through the arts and crafts exhibitions, see the city's many interesting sights, attend an evening concert in acoustically excellent St. Canice's Cathedral, and then, for those who are not yet worn out, drive back to Dublin. Although many writers poets Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes among themhave read their work here, music is the main thing, and many of the performers are internationally known.

LISTOWEL WRITERS' WEEK, Listowel, County Kerry, Irish Republic: Listowel is the chief town and center of an area distinguished by its writers, among them playwright John B. Keane, who runs a pub here, the short story writer Brian MacMahon, and the poets Brendan Kennally and Gabriel Fitzmaurice, who are the presiding spirits of this increasingly popular and enjoyable festival usually held during late May or early June.

They hold workshops in drama, poetry, and fiction writing for the interested and aspiring, plays are produced by authors new and old, books are launched, and writers give lectures on and readings from their own works and those of others.

Yet the atmosphere is anything but academic. Among the musical concerts, art exhibitions, book fairs, and poster showings is the John Jameson, Humorous Essay Open Competition (first prize: a cut-glass decanter full of Joyce's favorite whiskey). At this event, the main purpose is enjoyment and people have been known to engage in the pursuit there-of all night. The pubs are friendly, and there's also an official club where a band plays dance music, and the assembled writers, aspiring writers, and other attendant festive spirits when not drinking leap about the floor.

ROSE OF TRALEE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL, Tralee, County Kerry, Irish Republic: Nowadays, nobody takes the competitive element of this beauty contest with a difference too seriously, but young women still come from all over the world at the end of August or early September to vie for a Waterford crystal trophy and the title Rose of Tralee, first made famous by tenor John McCormack. But this 6-day event goes beyond McCormack and, as a sort of Irish Mardi Gras, provides an extraordinary range of entertainment, from donkey and greyhound races and tugs of war to fireworks, brass band concerts, performances of traditional USIC, cabarets, and much more.

At any given moment, it might be possible to find four or five acts going on in different parts of the town. People roam the streets from early morning until late at night, and the Guinness flows like a flood. There's always something happening, and most of it is free. Nearly 100,000 attend.
ST. PATRICK'S WEEK, countrywide, Irish Republic: Irishmen and Irishwomen by birth, ancestry, or natural conviction descend on the Emerald Isle to celebrate the 17th of March with a week of holiday fun.

In Dublin, there are concerts of music and dance in St. Stephen's Green, Gaelic football and hurling matches, an annual dog show hairy with tradition, and the biggest parade the capital can muster with foreign and local brass bands, silver bands, fife and drum bands, pipe bands, and accordion bands, competitive exhibits on foot and on huge floats, Irish dancers in battalions, Irish and American majorettes, antique cars, and 18th-century ceremonial coaches bearing lord mayors dripping with gold chains and driven by solemn fellows in tricorn hats, not to mention legions of happy visitors, almost everyone of them greenhatted and beflagged.

It's a great sight, and every child in Dublin exercises his right to attend, festooned with shamrocks and round-eyed with delight. All of Ireland's other villages and towns do as much as they can of the same program and many have their parades on the Sunday after the big day to give the citizenry the chance to do the whole thing not once but twice. It's March often wet, cold, and windy. But most of the time visitors don't notice the weather, even if they forget their waterproofs.

WEXFORD FESTIVAL OPERA, Wexford, County Wexford, Irish Republic: In the latter half of October, when the nights get long and cold, this harbor town comes alive with an event that, from a social point of view alone, is probably one of the most enjoyable in Ireland, filling the town's narrow winding streets with opera lovers from all over the world. The festival's long drawing card is the opera usually two seldomperformed works by well known composers and one contemporary opus. Ticket prices are low, even by European standards, and performance quality is very high, as it has been since the festival's inception in 1951. Talented newcomers often use Wexford to launch their careers, and many well known singers (among them Frederica von Stade) have sung here.

Much of the backstage work, the ushering, and ticket selling is done by volunteers, and at least one member each of most local families is directly involved in the festival. As a result of such participation, this otherwise very elite event has become very public and popular. What makes it really special, though, is the setting a tiny opera house that seats only 446, crouched on a capillary of a side street plus a general feeling of style and opulence.

Among the broad range of events offered are concerts, recitals, and exhibitions and readings at the local arts center: There are also singing competitions in pubs and a window display competition that gets butchers, bakers, grocers, and others in on the act. Rounding out the roster are theatre presentations, lectures, walking tours, flower shows and art shows, and other events. To add to the glamour, several of Wexford's public buildings, including a few designed by Pugin, are floodlit for the duration.

WILLY CLANCY SUMMER SCHOOL,Miltown Malbay, County Clare, Irish Republic: Following the early death of the great piper Willy Clancy, a delightful man, his friends decided that musicians particularly pipers should come together every year in July in his memory to play, teach, and learn the pipes not hearty warpipes but the cunning, sweetly toned little uilleann, traditional and unique to Ireland.

It is an instrument that lacks the shrillness of Scottish warpipes and has a wide melodic variation. It's easy to understand the Irish wag's remark about how the Irish exported bagpipes to Scotland and the Scots haven't yet caught on to the joke. Old and young, American and Irish, novices, experts who can pipe their listeners into a trance, and wildly diverse others jam the pubs, and the music goes on and on.

Come closing time, the doors are locked so that no new merrymakers may enter, but those present remain as long as they can stay awake.

BELFAST FESTIVAL AT QUEEN'S, Belfast, Northern Ireland: One of the two biggest cultural events in the United Kingdom (the other is the Edinburgh Festival), this November event has, since its beginnings in the early 1960s, created excitement on the cultural scene that even the troubles have not been able to undermine. Although it covers the entire spectrum of the arts, the emphasis traditionally has been on classical music. But the jazz and film programs are excellent, and folk and popular music are well represented, as is a spectrum of drama, opera, and ballet, with visiting companies from the Republic and the rest of Europe.

Superstars like Cleo Laine and Dame Janet Baker, James Galway and Yehudi Menuhin, and Billy Connolly and Michael Palin have performed here. The setting is the Victorian campus Of Queen's University; concerts are also presented in the Grand Opera House, the Ulster Hall, and the Arts, Lyric, and Group theatre.

CORK INTERNATIONAL CHORAL AND FOLK DANCE FESTIVAL, Cork, County Cork, Irish Republic: This event takes place annually at the beginning of May. Choirs and folk dance teams from all over the world participate, and each year a number of choral works are commissioned from distinguished composers.

DUN LAOGHAIRE SUMMER FESTIVAL, Dun laoghaire, County Dublin, Irish Republic: During the last week in June, this prosperous and well-kept old borough 6 miles from Dublin expresses its essentially Victorian style with art exhibits and musical soirees in the Maritime Institute (High St.), local tours and trips to nearby Dalkey Island, a ball, a regatta, and everything from sea chantey concerts to Punch and Judy shows. Dun Laoghaire's popular harbor is jammed with boats and yachts.

PAN CELTIC WEEK, Killarney, County Kerry, Irish Republic: Scots, Welsh, Manx, Bretons, Basques, their kin, and their descendants are warmly welcomed back to their home turf with concerts, displays, parades, and plenty of music, song, and dance.

Theatres and the arts in Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:59:00 +0000

The Irish tend to agree with the late theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who once noted Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness. The contribution of this nation´s writers is outstanding and all out of proportion to the island's small population.

The names Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, 0' Casey, Behan, and Beckett, to ame but a few inevitably crop up whenever great drama is under discussion and with them, the names of such late great actors and actresses as Barry Fitzgerald and Siobhan McKenna as well as those of their successors.

With all this going on, settling on an evening's entertainment (or an afternoon's, for that matter) can pose some problems. When it comes to theater, one man s meat is another's poison, so before settling on a play, ask a friend or check the dally papers In Dublin, Cork, and Belfast; Galway's Connacht Tribune; the fortnightly events guide In Dublin; and the monthly In Belfast.

Some theatres reliably turn out productions and concerts that are more InterestIng or wonderful than others, and some are worth a visit in their own right because they are either particularly beautiful or unusually historic.

A few are quite small, so that even the most remote corner affords a fine view of the activities on stage and the prices are usually relatively low . A few of the best theaters are listed here, by county.

ABBEY THEATRE, Dublin, Irish Republic: The fine collection of portraits; including likenesses ofW. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, and Sean O'Casey, that graces the foyer of the Abbey Theatre the country's national theatre is a vivid reminder of those heady days when the premieres of O'Casey's Plough and the Stars and Synge's The Playboy of the Western World were greeted by riot and disorder.

Though audiences are less boisterous now and the company is less lIkely to be arrested (as it was in Philadelphia in 1912, for performing immoral and indecent plays), the Abbey still presents the best of contemporary Irish play writing, includIng productions of works by Brian Friel, Hugh Leonard, and Thomas Murphy, among others, as well as revivals of the classics that made the old Abbey Players famous. Work of a more experimental nature is presented downstairs, in the Peacock; the opportunity to visit this wonderfully intimate auditorium should not be missed.

After the show, slip across the road for a drink in The Plough, full of posters of past Abbey successes, or in The Flowing Tide, with attractive stained glass panels set into the walls and mingle with the actors who have just taken their bows.

ANDREWS LANE THEATRE, Dublin, Irish Republic: Tucked in an alley off Dame Street and not far from Trinity College, this is one of Dublin's newer theatres, making its mark with performances of such contemporary plays as Agnes of God. In addition to the main theater, there is a small studio which serves as a stage for avant-garde productions, including occasional lunchtime shows and performances by all-female acting troupes.

FOCUS THEATRE, Dublin, Irish Republic: Dublin's smallest theatre is also one of its most exciting. In 1963, when Deirdre O'Connell returned to Ireland after studying in New York at Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio, she began to train some Dublin actors in Stanislavskian technique and, by 1967, had formed the nucleus of a company and moved into a converted garage in a lane off Pembroke Street. An evening in this tiny, 72-seat auditorium is never disappointing, whether the play be a classic by Chekhov or the latest offering of a young Irish writer.

Besides the resident Focus Company, there is a Studio Company of young actors in training who occasionally present their own improvised and very original adaptations of Irish legends and literature. It is no exaggeration to say that, along with some of the finest actors in Dublin (including O'Connell herself), Focus theatergoers glimpse the stars of tomorrow.

GAIETY THEATRE, Dublin, Irish Republic: The Gaiety is where many a Dublin child, brought for a special occasion to a pantomime perhaps or a Gilbert and Sullivan musical, gets a first taste of the magic of theatre.
It was founded in 1871 by Michael Gunn and his brother John (a bust of whom can be seen on the staircase that leads to the circle), and although the original gallery, or gods, was removed when the theatre was renovated in 1955, the theatre remains a very fine example of the typical late-Victorian playhouse: It is marvellously opulent, with red carpets, dark pillars, golden draperies, and ornate pink cream plasterwork, and the orchestra pit's brass surround enhances the total effect.

In a private box, patrons feel like no less than visiting royalty. The letters patent issued at the theatre´s founding allows for the production of any interlude, tragedy, comedy, prelude, opera, burletta, play, farce or pantomime, and today's repertoire remains just that broad. As a result, the list of the famous who have played at the Gaiety is formidable, including Lily Langtry, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, Burgess Meredith, Siobhan McKenna, Paulette Goddard, the Bolshoi Ballet, Peter O'Toole and Dublin's own Jimmy O'Dea, who for nearly 30 years appeared in pantomime and musical and, in the character of Biddy Mulligan, captured the true spirit of the city.

GATE THEATRE, Dublin, County Dublin, Irish Republic: The name of the Gate Theatre is synonymous with those of the late Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, who organized the company in 1928 to present plays of unusual interest, regardless of nationality or period, at a time when the Abbey devoted itself entirely to Irish work.

The founders' tradition continues under the direction of Michael Colgan, and theatre-goers here are as likely to find a play by Tennessee Williams as one by Brian Friel or a young unknown. The visual emphasis is strong, and the theater has received awards for its stage designs. The auditorium is quite small and, as might be expected from the Gate's reputation for stage design, beautifully decorated, so that it feels less like a modern playhouse than an 18thcentury aristocrat's court theatre.

The young Orson Welles was once employed by the Gate, after exaggerating his previous experience, but proved his talents there as, subsequently, elsewhere. James Mason and Geraldine Fitzgerald also began their careers here.

OLYMPIA THEATRE, Dublin, Irish Republic: This stage occupies a very special place in the hearts of Dubliners, perhaps because of its connection with music hall, always the most popular form of theatre here. Patrons on the 1879 opening night at Dan Lowrey's Star of Erin (as the playhouse was then called) enjoyed such wonders as Mademoiselle Miaco, the Boneless Wonder, and Signor Zula, who swung from a high trapeze by his feet, with weights suspended from his teeth.

Part of the theatre's charm may be gauged from the fact that one of its bars is named not for some famous performer or patron, but for Kathleen Kelly, who served wit and kindness as well as drink from behind its counter for many decades. The only theatre in Dublin that still retains its gallery, or gods, from whose dizzying heights one can see the tops of the performers' heads far below, it is also notable for the Waterford cut-glass chandeliers and the two huge mirrors on either side of the circle in which the spectators can monitor their own reactions while watching the performance.

And, though television has meant the end of theatrical variety, the Olympia still presents concerts and pantomimes as well as plays, both Irish and foreign, and hosts visiting performers such as mime king Marcel Marceau. After each show, the bars remain open for half an hour and the actors congregate in Kelly's bar, attached to the theater, to drink to the memory of days gone by.

THE POINT, Dublin, Irish Republic: Also known as the Point Depot because it was formerly a depot building, this theatre-cum-concert hall presents everything from U2 concerts to Broadway hits, such as Cats. Ticket prices are heftier here than at any other performing arts venue in Dublin, and most events are booked well in advance.

ROYAL DUBLIN SOCIETY CONCERT HALL, Dublin, Irish Republic: While most people think of traditional Irish music when they think of Dublin, it's also true that high quality classical music can be found here. This is at least in part thanks to the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), which stages recitals from November to March in its 1,206-seat Members' Hall, also known as the RDS Concert Hall.

Although the acoustics are not all that one might desire for small chamber ensembles and soloists, the attractive booklined walls add a touch of intimacy that is not often encountered in concert halls nowadays, and many distinguished musicians have played here in recent years among them the Smetana String Quartet.

DRUID LANE THEATRE, Galway, County Galway, Irish Republic: Installed in a former grocery warehouse in the oldest part of the city, near the Spanish Arch, the quays, and the old city walls, the home of the Druid Theatre Company is perhaps the most attractive small theatre in Ireland, its intimacy enhanced by the way in which the seating surrounds the stage on three sides.

The company was founded in 1975 by Garry Hynes, still the artistic director, and in a short time has become renowned for its productions oflrish classics such as Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn and Molloy's Wood of Whispering, as well as contemporary Irish plays (in particular, those by Tom Murphy) and works from abroad.

There's good reason to believe that the lane on which the theatre is built is haunted by the ghost of a nun who walks slowly through the street at night.But don't let this get in the way of an evening with this exciting young group.

GRAND OPERA HOUSE, Belfast, Northern Ireland: When architect Robert McKinstry first went into the deserted building of Belfast's Grand Opera House and Cirque in the summer of 1975, he found the house manager's black jacket still hanging on the back of his office door. Crates of bottled beer stood unopened behind the bar where 4 years of dust topped the dour liquids in the half-empty glasses.

An upturned chair floated in the orchestra pit. The ashtrays on the backs of the seats in the circle were stuffed with the detritus of chocolate box wrappings and butts of now unfashionable local cigarette brands. In a drawer in the projection room lay a single copy of a pamphlet entitled How to Emigrate. But now the Opera House has come back to life. The brass rails that once reflected the footlights that illuminated Pavlova and the Divine Sarah (Bernhardt) glisten again, and the turn-of-thecentury theatre has been restored to its full plush and stucco glory.

Christmas pantomimes share the bill with drama companies from all over Britain and Ireland, international opera and ballet companies, and major popular entertainers among them the National Theatre. the Royal Flanders Ballet, the Centaur Theatre of Montreal, the Berlin Chamber Orchestra. Carlo Bergonzi, the Scottish Ballet, the Moscow Balalaika Orchestra. a harp ensemble from Japan, the Peking Opera.

Airport car hire Ireland

If you enjoy the theatre, and want to make the most of the wonderful theatres in Ireland, hire a car from Dublin Airport, Shannon Airport, Galway Airport, Knock Airport or Cork Airport and make the most of the wonderful venues in Ireland.

James Galway, the Chieftains, and modern dancers from New York. In July and early August, the house usually is dark.

Ireland attractions

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:55:00 +0000

The National Museum Dublin

The massive Thomas Deane building on Kildare Street into which the old Royal Dublin Society moved its collection in 1890 and, shortly thereafter, the antiquities from the Royal Irish Academy has lost some of its territory over the years.

Its display space is inadequate, and many items are not exhibited to their best advantage. These shortcomings notwithstanding, the museum should not be missed. It has priceless collections of prehistoric gold artifacts, such as solid gold dress fasteners, torques, and lunulae made by the skilled craftsmen of the Bronze and Iron ages.

An exhibition area called The Treasury features the museum's important collection of early Christian metalwork, including the Ardagh Chalice and the Cross of Congo The Georgian silver, Waterford crystal, and Belleek pottery on display are equally captivating.

Visitors should not miss the collection of Irish harps, uilleann pipes, and other musical instruments, nor the Derrynaflan chalice, paten, and strainer, found in March 1980 at Killenaule in Tipperary. Finds from the site of Viking Dublin are on display in the museum's exhibition center at nearby Merrion Row.

The James Joyce Museum County Dublin

Like other Martello towers around the Irish coast, the one that houses this museum was built in 1804 to withstand a threatened Napoleonic invasion, and it would have remained an attractive but fairly anonymous pile of granite had it not been for James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the greatest novels in the English language.

The novel begins: Do you pay rent for this tower? Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said. To the Secretary of State for War, Stephen added over his shoulder ... Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello, you call it? Joyce lived here briefly in 1904 with a medical student friend named Oliver St.

John Gogarty, who paid an annual rent to the War Office for his tenancy, and emerged in print as the stately plump Buck Mulligan to Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego. Sylvia Beach, Ulysses' first publisher, opened the tower as a museum in 1962, and it now holds an odd and varied collection of memorabilia: the writer's piano and guitar; his waistcoat, tie, and cane; and letters, manuscripts, photographs, and rare editions.

But the chief exhibit is the tower itself, a squat structure looking across Dublin Bay to Howth that is one of the few of its type currently open to the public.On June 16, the day when the events described in Ulysses took place, the tower is the beginning for many a Joyce fan's Doomsday tour.

Muckross House and Gardens County Kerry

The emphasis at this museum, another among the Republic's most forward looking, is as much on displaying the objects in an interesting way as on preserving them, and a great deal of thought and effort has been put into every exhibit. In addition, potters and weavers can be seen at work, producing the kinds of items displayed in the museum proper.

When sated, visitors can go out for a stroll on one of the nature trails that meander across the vast grounds (which, together with the early 19th century house containing the exhibits, were presented to the nation in 1932 and now comprise the 25,000 acre Killarney National Park). The footpaths alone might warrant a visit here, encircling two of the lakes of Killarney. There is also a superb natural rock garden d an abundance of freeroaming red deer and rare flora.

The Horse Museum County Kildare

Having produced some of the world's greatest thoroughbreds, County Kildare is still turning them out at the Irish National Stud on whose grounds this museum is located; a few of these animals and their prgeny may be seen before and after viewing its collections.Small but interesting, the exhibits trace the history of the horse from the Bronze Age to modern times and cover not only horses involved in racing, hunting, show Jumping, and steeplechasing, but also draft horses and others not at the fore of the IrIsh horse scene.

Occupying center stage is the skeleton of the late Arkle (1957-66), one of the nation's greatest and bestloved steeplechasers, who made a place for himself In equine history when he won the Cheltenham Gold Cup 3 years in a row much to the consternation of British trainers and the glee of every IrIshman plus some 27 other victories in only 35 starts. For achievement-oriented visitors, there's an automated quiz and nearby are beautiful Japanese gardens laid out by a turnofthecentury Japanese landscape architect named Eida.

Monaghan County Museum

One of the Republic's first county museums, this institution formerly situated in a bleak old courthouse with huge Doric columns that must have put the fear of God into prisoners during the last century has a stunning and eclectic collectIon ranging from Neolithic relics to folk items.
And it now has a home of Its own that provides the showcase they deserve. Stuffed with china dinner sets, lace made in nearby Carrikmacross, and the cotton crochet known as Clones lace, the museum also contains artifacts such as the Cross of Clog her, which dates from the early 15th centry, as well as a cauldron (ca. 800 BC) found in a bog in 1854, old photographs, and In an openaccess exhibition area, a collection of querns (hand mills), milk churns, and milestones from the now unused Ulster Canal.

County Castle Museum County Wexford

A medieval air hangs over this town, with its narrow streets winding down to the rIver Slaney on one side and with Vinegar Hill, where the Irish rebels were defeated In 1758, rising on the other. The museum, housed in a 13th-century Norman castle on which the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser once held a lease (one of the few Irish castles not in ruins), contains muskets, pikes, and other relics of the battle, as well as objects from the 1916 Rising (during which this town was the last in the country to surrender).

But the museum's contents are not restricted to military impedimenta: A kltcheq at the back of the castle and a dairy showcase traditional cooking utensils and tools, including churns used in the old days for making butter and cheese. There are also striking displays of figureheads salvaged from ships wrecked off the coast, a stone covered with ogham script, ships' anchors, stone crosses, an chahces dating from the 17th century.

A recently added feature is a sports collection,housed In a hitherto unused tower of the castle. And if all this is not enough temptation, the view from the castle roof alone is worth the visit.

National Heritage Park County Wexford

The museum on the sloping banks of the river Slaney estuary is devoted to showing a full range of Irish historic buildings, with structures dating. from the time of the earliest settlements to the present from stone Circles and burial sites to early Christian churches round towers, and the first Viking and Norman communities. It IS an elaborate undrtaking and thoroughly splendid.

Irish Agricultural Museum Wexford

In the restored 19th-century farm buildings of Victorian Gothic Johnstown Castle, about 3 miles southwest of Wexford Town, this museum provides an excellent picture of just how much Irish farming has changed in the last 50 years. Its display of old farming and rural craft items, the country's largest, includes the hand flails, pitchers, turnip pulpers, buttermaking instruments, ploughs, harrows, sowers, mowing machines, harnesses, and carts and traps that were once among every Irish farmer's most important tools.

A complete model of an old kitchen is on exhibit, along with a laundry, creamery, laborer's bedroom, and stable. There are also displays 'on coopering, blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, harness making, and traditional Irish country furniture. The castle's 50-acre gardens full of meandering pathways, artificial lakes, and interesting shrubs and flowers are also a delight, and a tearoom is open at the museum from June through August.
The castle and surrounding farm are used for soil research by the Agricultural Institute.

The Ulster Museum Belfast

Housed in a 1920s neo-classical building with a well-designed modern addition that stands right in the city's delightful Botanic Gardens, the collections are broad-ranging: There's an old, functioning water wheel (in the Industrial Archaeology section); a group of contemporary paintings and sculpture unrivaled in Ireland (in the Art Galleries); prehistoric artifacts including the only surviving pair of late Bronze Age trumpets that can still be played; a display of minerals and gemstones unique in the country (including the largest group of quartz crystals in Britain and Ireland, an attractive display of fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals in a darkened central vault, and a full size cave); and, for a touch of glitter, the fabulous collection of jewelry, coins, and other items recovered from the Girona, a galley of the Spanish Armada that went down off the Antrim Coast in 1588.

The Living Sea exhibit abounds with realistic models of marine creatures, and the Dinosaur Show, a gallery designed with children in mind, features a nearcomplete skeleton of Anatosaurus annecteus as well as an enormous, now extinct, coelacanth in the old entrance hall. The museum store sells copies of the gold No tengo mas que darte ring, the original of which was worn by a Spanish sailor as he went to his watery grave, mindful, no doubt, of the sweetheart who gave it to him.

The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum County Down

For a glimpse of how Ulster folk lived back at the turn of the century. Brick by brick, stone by stone, terraces of townhouses, as well as farmhouses, mills, a church, and schools, were moved here, then furnishd with the everyday objects of the appropriate period, and landscaped as they might have been originally.

A farm from mid-Antrim has been reconstructed right down to the stone walls, hedges, and ditches around the fields. There's also an assortment of galleries filled with domestic and agricultural artifacts and vehicles used in Irish transport over the ages rail, road, air, and sea. In fact, the museum is the home of the finest and most comprehensive such display in Ireland, with wheelless sledges, elegant horsedrawn carriages, automobiles (including a De Lorean sports car prototype), and even a vertical take-off plane.

The Ulster-American Folk Park

Born in 1813 in a thatch-roofed cottage near here, Thomas Mellon emigrated to the New World at the age of 5 and then traveled overland by wagon to western Pennsylvania, where he grew up as the son of struggling small farmers to found the banking empire that bears his name.

Now, the original Mellon cottage is restored, and it serves as the center of a 26-acre folk park where the Old World and New World stand physically side by side. From 19th-century Ulster, where turf fires burn, blacksmiths work at their forges, craftsmen toil in their thatchroofed cottages, and hardware stores sell lamp wicks and foot warmers, visitors are transported to a very different American landscape, complete with log cabins, a covered wagon, and a reconstructed Pennsylvania farm complex that has been furnished and equipped exactly like the one in which Mellon spent his boyhood, where demonstrators bake, weave, and churn, and log fires crackle on the hearth.

Museums and places to go in Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:52:00 +0000

Ireland's antiquities, impressive by any standards, are mostly concentrated in the National Museum in Dublin, which should not be missed under any circumstances. But numerous small museums in the provinces offer local collections and eccentric private collections of varying quality.

Ireland also boasts a number of fine openair facilities that show off the lifestyles of earlier people in vivid detail with restored or reconstructed dwellings and workplaces. Most of these are in settings of great beauty.All charge nominal admission, if any, and are open year-round unless otherwise indicated; be sure to call for current hours before making a special trip.

Pig House Collection in County Cavan

Housed in a former piggery and several other outbuildings on a picturesque farm, this collection of folk items is an odd and idiosyncratic hodgepodge of dishes, tools, implements, pictures, bicycles, carriages, parasols, lace, 19thcentury costumes, bricabrac, and even a few rare treasures. Though a little off the beaten path, it is worth a visit perhaps as a detour on the way to Killykeen Forest Park not only for the collection itself but also for the trip through the very pleasant and out-of-theway countryside. From the midland town of Cavan, take the road west toward Killeshandra, then watch for the signpost.The gallery is about 8 miles from Cavan.

Bun Ratty Castle and Folk Park County Clare

Associated with the O'Briens, the Lords of Thomond, and now authentically restored and furnished in the style of the period, Bunratty Castle is currently famous for its jovial medieval banquets. But it is also one of Ireland's finest existing 15th-century castles.

Together with the adjoining Folk Park, whose several acres abound with period replicas of Irish rural and town dwellings as they would have appeared at the turn of the century, it provides a glimpse of how the Irish have lived during the last few centuries.

Visitors can step into whitewashed or limestone farmhouses, cottages, hovels, and other domiciles from different regions (one of them was moved from a spot that subsequently became a Shannon Airport runway), as well as a typical landowner's bothiin (hut), a blacksmith's forge, a weaver's shed, and a village street complete with post office, pub, school, doctor's office, hotel, and other shops.

Turf fires smolder fragrantly in the hearths, socks hang nearby to dry, an old farm implement leans casually against a wall so that it all looks as if someone has just left the room. The effect is totally charming. Bunratty House, a substantial late Georgian dwelling of the type once occupied by minor gentry, rounds out Bunratty's fine document of Irish social history. A small, well-illustrated guidebook to the castle, available on the spot, is worth getting.

Clare Heritage Centre County Clare

In an attractive small town at the edge of the Burren, a desolately beautiful semi-desert of limestone rock that is transformed in May and June by the brilliant blossoms of its rare and unusually varied flowering plants, travelers will find this enterprising project, in the specially converted early 19th-century Church of Saint Catherine.

The center's collection, which has won several awards for its creator, includes artifacts and documents from all over the county, attractively displayed alongside texts that are lively and readable as well as informative. It is also now the source of an extraordinarily complete documentation of Clare families over the period from 1800-1860 an enormous contribution to Irish genealogical and social research.

The Craggaunowen Project County Clare

Craggaunowen Castle, built by the McNamaras around 1550 and furnished with many items of historical and artistic importance from the John Hunt collection, is only the center-piece of this unique outdoor museum, which comprises a number of other structures that reach deep into the past to convey a sense of life in prehistoric times. On an island in the lake, a dwelling known as a crannog has been reconstructed on the foundations of an original; it is approached by a causeway that may have been used as early as the Bronze Age.

There is also a reconstructed ring fort, the farmstead of Ireland's early history, which has an underground passageway for storage and refuge. Patty O'Neill runs a program whose aim is to interest and train young people in the fine traditional art of thatching. Displays also include the Brendan, the leather boat in which the writer and amateur sailor Tim Severin crossed the Atlantic a decade or so ago in an attempt to prove that the 5th-century St. Brendan could have discovered America, as legend has it, when sailing the seas in search of paradise.

Glenveagh Castle and Glebe Gallery County Donegal

Glenveagh National Park, which sprawls over 25,000 acres of Donegal's wild and remote Derryveagh Mountains, includes in its boundaries the awesome Poisoned Glen; the long tongue of Lough Veagh; and, at the edge of its waters, where salmon leap and red deer come to drink, the grounds of Glenveagh Castle, its towers and battlements constituting one of the more romantic creations of 19th-century Ireland.

Successive owners have created gardens of extraordinary beauty formal, terraced, and graced with statuary, criss-crossed by secret pathways, and dissolving gradually into the native heather scrub and dwarf oak of the surrounding rugged mountains. The government purchased the outlying lands in 1975, Philadelphia's Henry Mcilhenny gave the grounds and the castle to the Irish people in 1981, and they are now all open to the public, together with the former home of painter Derek Hill at Gartan Lough, on the edge of the estate.

The castle is filled with rare furniture mostly Georgian, some Irish, all of it very fine and a special gallery on the grounds of Hill's studio displays an extensive art collection that includes ceramics by Picasso, lithographs by Kokoschka, paintings and sketches by Annigoni, and wallpapers by William Morris, as well as works by distingUIshed Irish artists.

A number of informed people regard the whole complex as the most wonderful spot in all Ireland. A visitors' center, restaurant, and cafe are on the premises, and a free minibus takes travelers around the grounds.

Chester Beatty Library Dublin

The collection that copper mIllIonaire Chester Beatty bequeathed to the Irish nation in 1968, housed near the Royal Dublin Society building in plush, embassy belt Ballsbridge, evokes one superlative after another. The collection of Islamic art and manuscripts, among the finest in the world, includes more than 250 Korans; Persian, Turkish, and Indian painting are also extensively covered. The collection of Chinese jade books is unique.

The Chinese snuffbox collection numbers 900 pieces, and that of rhinoceros horn cups includes some 220 items. The collection of Japanese illuminated manuscripts (narae) ranks with the foremost in Europe, as does the collection of Japanese woodblock prints (surimono). The superb group of Western manuscripts includes illuminated books of hours and a volume of gospels from Stavelot Abbey, executed in Flanders in about AD 1000.

The important biblical papyri, 11 manuscript volumes of the Bible dating from the early 2nd to the 4th century, are also in the library's possession. Naturally, it is possible to display only a tiny fraction of the library's holdings at a time, but the permanent exhibitions offer a representative sampling, and there are major shows a few times a year.

Museum of Natural History in Dublin

Dublin, Irish Republic: Much loved for its refusal to change an iota over the course of the past century, this museum, originally among the three major Royal Dublin Society collections, was moved over a century ago to a building designed by Thomas Clarendon and constructed on the south side of Leinster Lawn, with an entrance on Merrion Square. The first sight to greet a visitor's eye is that old favorite, the Basking Shark, a huge preserved shark which hangs from the ceiling.

Also popular is the display of birds, as well as the three magnificent skeletons of Giant Irish Deer, believed to be about 10,000 years old. On the ground floor, the Irish Room displays Irish fauna and a new exhibition of Irish insects.

An impressive collection of big game heads and antlers from India and Africa bison, panda, giraffe, okapi, rhinos, hippos, elephants, and gorillas hanging on pillars and walls in the galleries on the upper floor transports museumgoers to late Victorian times. On the next floor are exotic shells, butterflies, and birds plus skeletons of the extinct dodo, solitaire, and giant bird of Madagascar, with its 7inch egg. A priceless assemblage of glass models of the invertebrates, which dates from the museum's earliest days, is also well worth seeing.

Suspended from the roof are the huge skeletons of humpback whales. From the museum's last period of vigorous acquisition the 1880s to 1914, when deepsea explorations generated additions to the marine biology and zoology sections to very recently, there was little activity in the museum; the impressive geological collection has long languished unseen for want of a proper home.

In the geological section there is a small exhibition of Irish rocks and minerals, and the museum has expanded its activities in the field of entomology and marine invertebrates.There is so much to see and do in Ireland that the best way to get around the attractions is to hire a car from the airport at Galway, Knock, Dublin, Shannon, Knock or Cork Airports.

The National Gallery of Ireland

Located on the western side of one of Ireland's finest Georgian districts, Merrion Square, within walking distance of the center of town, the National Gallery has been called the best small gallery in Europe. Certainly, considering its chronic shortage of funds, it has a remarkable collection, with some outstanding examples of the works of all major schools, particularly the Italian and Dutch.

Under the previous director, James White, and the present director, Homan Potterton, the gallery has shaken off an apparent case of the doldrums, regained much of its style of several decades past, and begun to achieve its potential. Andrea di Bartolo, Fra Angelico, Uccello, Signorelli, Perugino, Titian, Rembrandt, EI Greco, and David are all represented; a collection of more than 30 Turner watercolors is shown every January.

The Irish School is brilliantly represented by the works of Jack Yeats and earlier painters such as Nathaniel Hone, Walter Osborne, William Orpen, and James Arthur O'Connor. Though staff shortages often cause a number of its rooms to be closed, the gallery is lively and interesting, with an educational policy, a good research library, a modest bookshop, and an inexpensive restaurant that has become a popular Dublin meeting place.

Great places to go in Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:45:00 +0000

The Mountains of Mourne

This granite range in the north-eastern section of the island south of Belfast is not very large, but the scenery is especially lovely, with good views, sapphire lakes, and rugged gray rocks. The principal peak of the group, 2,796-foot Slieve Donard, stands out as a particularly good climb, both for its relative ease and its attractiveness, especially when approached from the town of Newcastle. On fine clear days, it's possible to see the Isle of Man, the peaks of the English Lake District, the mountains of Wales, and Scotland's islands.

Those with a full day to spare should walk along the ridge to 2,448-foot Slieve Binnian, to see the aptly named Silent Valley and its reservoir, the source of Belfast's water supply, and, beyond it, lonely little Lough Shannagh. Other good hikes include the ascents of 2,394-foot Slieve Bearnagh and of 2,512-foot Slieve Commedagh.

The big challenge in the Mournes is to walk the wall that delineates the Belfast Water Supply catchment area, which in fact takes in all the major summits.

The creation of a Round Ireland Trail, with a number of sections and spur paths, is a plank in the development platform of the Republic's National Sports Council, which has set up a Long Distance Walking Routes Committee (LDWRC) to promote development of long distance footpaths.

Hiking in Ireland

It is possible to take day hikes along any of these (though it may be difficult to get a bus back to the starting point), but the more ambitious can also plan a multi-day walk, with overnights in hostels, bed and breakfast establishments, and guesthouses not far from the trail or, having asked in advance, camp on local farms.

Note that many of the trails run for considerable distances through state forests, where camping and fires are strictly forbidden.The most interesting treks are listed below in the order they are encountered along the Round Ireland Trail.

Wicklow Way Dublin Ireland

This 80-mile trek contours the east side of the Wicklow Mountains, then wanders among the smaller hills in the south part of County Dublin, passing through many beautiful valleys, most notably Luggala; Powerscourt, known for its waterfall; and Glendalough, whose monastic ruins are described in Ancient Monuments and Ruins.

The route then proceeds through lush mature forests over the spurs of the mountains, with fine panoramas of hills and the Irish Sea. The Dublin Way, which crosses the Dublin mountains from east to west and joins the Wicklow Way, offers another diversion. Because both of these run close to Dublin, they are the most frequented of the Irish trails, and good accommodations, including several youth hostels, are within easy reach.

South Leinster Way

Beginning just 4 miles from the end of the Wicklow Way, thIs 58mile footpath climbs via forest tracks over the shoulder of Mount Leinster at the 1,500foot level, to expose vistas over Wexford to the east and the beautiful river Barrow Valley straight ahead.

To make the most of the beautiful hikes and trails around Ireland, it is worth hiring a car from the airport in Ireland and taking your time to follow the walking trails around the country.

The trail then descends to the river and follows the riverside towpath for a few miles to Graiguenamanagh, a picturesque market town that is the site of a 13th-century Cistercian abbey. At Graiguenamanagh, it begins climbing agam, over the shoulder of Brandon Hill, and thence proceeds over byroads and forest footpaths to the river Nore, at Inistioge, and on to Carrick-on-Suir.

Burren Way County Clare

Covering a distance of 14 miles around the rugged, almost lunar, landscape of County Clare, this is the newest of Ireland's sign-posted walking trails. The route starts near the Atlantic coast, north of Doolin and slightly west of Lisdoonvarna, and stretches by the valley of Oughtdarra and Ballyryan.

It then gently climbs to the uplands of Ballynahown, joining the Green Road through the highlands of the Burren, with its sheets of limestone and shale-covered hills. Next comes the contrasts of the Caher Valley, the Feenagh Valley, and the Rathborney River, ending at Ballyvaughan on the southern slopes of Galway Bay.

The path takes in many sights that are indigenous to the Burren: vast stretches of limestone, massive beds of granite, rock pavements, karst land, clints (horizontal slabs), grikes (vertical fissures), caverns and caves, ruined castles, and cliff forts, as well as wildlife, birds, and flora representing a mix of Arctic, Alpine, and Mediterranean species.

East Munster Trail

The towpath on the river Suir takes this 36-mile trail as far as Clonmel, where it continues via forest trails and byroads to the end of the Comeragh range and into the pleasant, peaceful Nier Valley.After crossing the Nier, the trail rambles through the woods on the northern side of the Knockmealdown Mountains, affording lovely views of the Galtee Mountains to the northwest, then climbs the aptly named Vee Gap, and finally descends through the woods.

Kerry Way Ireland

This 36-mile stretch of footpath cuts south through the Muckross National Park, past the celebrated lakes of Killarney, to Tore Mountain, an unrivaled viewpoint over the MacGillicuddy Reeks, and then follows the old Kenmare road, now unused, for a few miles before crossing into the remote Black Valley, immediately underneath the reeks. The trail is almost entirely on old Mass paths as it travels westward below the reeks to the rarely visited Bridia Valley and on to Glencar.

There it crosses the valley by road and forest path, supplying hikers with good views of Caragh Lake, and then climbs over Windy Gap to descend to Glenbeigh on the Ring of Kerry. Here the adventurous can pick up the trail of the disused railway line that goes almost to Cahirciveen; otherwise, the RoundIreland Trail has a big gap.

Western Way County Mayo

From its starting point, an angling center, this 58-mile walk follows the shores of giant Lough Corrib, past one of the few remaining virgin forests in the west of the country, with fine panoramas of the lake's wooded north shore, before plunging into the mountains of Connemara. Ascending only to about 800 feet, the trail does not attain any great altitude, but the feel is definitely alpine as it winds between the bare quartzite peaks of the Maumturks and Twelve Bens before descending to the narrow mountain-fringed Killary Harbour.

From Lenane, near the head of this inlet, the trail heads up the ErriffValley and then through the South Mayo mountains, over the shore of the Sheffry Hills toward Croagh Patrick, Ireland's holy mountain. Beyond the ridge to its east, island speckled Clew Bay is straight ahead. Then the route turns east and travels along side roads to reach another angling center, Westport.

Ulster Way County Donegal

Connecting to the Ulster Way at the border town and famous pilgrimage center of Pettigo, this 62-mile trail traverses countryside that is significantly more remote than that of other trails definitely not for the inexperienced. It begins by skirting holy Lough Derg, where anglers reel in bountiful creels and thousands of pilgrims fast and pray in a cavern on Station Island every summer, then passes beautiful Lough Eske, and steers a careful course over the eastern side of the Blue Stack Mountains. Passing through the Glendowan Mountains, it descends to Glenveagh, crosses by the Poisoned Glen to Dunlewy, and climbs over the shoulder of Errigal before descending past Altan Lough to Falcarragh on the north coast. Accommodations are not plentiful, so take a tent.

Slieve Bloom Way

This 32 mile long route makes a circuit of the Slieve Bloom Mountains, which rise out of the Central Plain between Portlaoise and Tullamore, on the border of County Laois.

The route can be followed in whole or in part through the beautiful wooded valleys and glens of this range, which seems quite grand, despite its rather insignificant height (about 1,700 feet), because of the flat terrain all around. It is also possible to link up with the Kildare Trails, which largely follow the towpaths of the Grand Canal and its branches.

The Ulster Way around Northern Ireland

The 500-mile circle of Northern Ireland takes in some of Ireland's finest scenery, including the coast and glens of County AntrIm, with the magnificent Atlantic coast cliffs and bays, the Giant's Causeway, the Spernn Mountains, the Fermanagh Lakeland, the Mourne Mountains, and St. Patrick Country, rich in legend and antiquities.

From Belfast, the route winds through the quiet wooded valley of the river Lagan. In addition, the trail connects with several in the Republic: the wild and remote 62 mile-Iong Ulster Way in Donegal (with a junction at Pettigo); the 16 mile-long Cavan Way, short but varied and beautiful (intersecting Blacklion, County Fermanagh); and the circular Tain Trail, a 19-mile circle through the historic Carlingford Peninsula (with an unwaymarked link to the Ulster Trail at Uewry, County Down).

Wherever you want to start your walking tour of Ireland, it is worth pre-booking a hire car from Dublin, Galway, Cork, Shannon or Knock Airport to pick up when you arrive in Ireland. Airport car hire can be picked up from the terminal building, and by pre-booking you will save time and money when you arrive.

Walking and hiking in Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:43:00 +0000

Almost any walker will tell you that it is the footpaths of a country not its roadways that show off the landscape to best advantage. A walker is closer to earth than a person driving or even biking, and details that might otherwise be overlooked are more noticeable: incredibly tiny wildflowers blossoming cheerfully in a crack between limestone boulders, for instance, or a fox lurking in the shadows of the woods at dawn. And the scenery moves by at a slow speed, so that hedgerows, fences, and the green velvet pastures can be contemplated at leisure.

Churches and barns, old mills and lichen-crusted stone walls, and farms and villages are seldom far out of sight as a walker follows in the footsteps of neolithic man or Bronze Age gold traders or treads tracks first defined by smugglers, cattle drovers, abbots, or coffin carriers, whose ways would often be marked at the tops of passes by the stone piles where they rested their loads. Many paths were literally walked into existence by generations of country folk traveling to work, market, mass, or the pub. And in practice, it is possible to walk more or less freely on all of these paths, provided that what is obviolisly off limits is respected.

Forest parks in Ireland

Though some 100-odd forest parks exist throughout Ireland, the walks are mainly short and relatively easy. For longer tramps, it's necessary to head into the wild high country, mainly along the coast, where tracks are so rare and ill defined that walkers generally cross pathless hills and where map and compass are essential companions.

With summits that seldom rise above 3,000 feet, these mountains are no giants, but because the way up begins in valleys that are usually near sea level, the hikes turn out to be a good deal more demanding than one might at first expect.

The rewards are abundant, however: The ever-present sea and mountain views are awash in incredible blues and intense greens (thanks to the abundant rainfall). And chance encounters en route with fellow ramblers or with shepherds and their collies are a lot of fun.

This is true even when the weather turns rainy, as it may well do even at the height of summer, providing the visitor has come prepared. Stout walking shoes or boots are essential, as is a good rain parka, with leggings. And in addition to the usual walker's gear, a spare sweater is a necessity, even on a day hike especially in the Irish hills, where conditions can turn arctic within a matter of hours.

Historic castles forts and churches in Ireland

Ireland is a rich agricultural nation, and all the low country that is not boggy is checkered with fields separated by hedges and, with the exception of byways and the towpaths of waterways like the Grand Canal, is not particularly good for walking. This situation is not likely to change until the state's scheme to develop way marked lowland trails to historic castles, forts, and churches around the countryside is more fully developed.

For now, the walker and rambler in Ireland will generally choose to go to the hill areas near the coasts, where the scenery ranges from the limestone karst of County Clare's Burren to the bare, rocky quartzite peaks ofConnemara, from the dark, vegetationrich sandstone cliffs of Kerry to the rounded granite domes of Wicklow. The following are some of the most interesting areas, together with the names of maps and guidebooks that will be most helpful.

The Burren County Clare

The unforgettable karst plateau known as the Burren is mile upon mile of all but bare rock, almost desertlike and making no concession to prettiness; as one Cromwellian lieutenant quipped, it had not enough wood to hang a man, earth to bury him, or water to drown him. But there is magnificence here nonetheless.

Distances are short, views across Galway Bay to Connemara and the Aran Islands are magnificent, and in May and June the grikes (cracks) that seam the limestone sprout a stunning and eclectic collection of rare flowering plants unique in Europe gentians, cranesbill, brilliantly colored saxifrages, rosy Irish orchids whose seeds arrived on the winds from all over, like the topsoil that nourishes them. Sheltered from the Atlantic winds, their blossoms transform the landscape.

The mighty Cliffs of Moher, a few miles to the south, offer a fine clifftop walk, and the largest cave system in Ireland lies beneath. Most of these underground marvels are dangerous for the inexperienced or improperly equipped, but the Aillwee Cave, which is open to all, conveys the feeling.

County Donegal

Here in Ireland's northwest there are plenty of hills to walk and plenty of variety. Close to Donegal Town are the Blue Stack Mountains, granite domes rising from remote boggy valleys, with several attractive walks most notably that from Lough Eske on the southeast up to cragbound Lough Belshad and the 2,218 foot summit of Croagh Gorm. At the western extremity of the county, around Glencolumbkille, named for the famous Celtic patron saint of Derry and Donegal, stand. 1,972foot Slieve League and 1,458 foot. Slieve Tooey.

Though the altitudes are minor, the hIlls themselves are spectacular, since their clIffs fall directly from summit to sea. Scary tales are told about One Man's Path on the ridge of Slieve League, with a drop of some 1,800 feet into the roiling surf on one side and a nearvertical escarpment' on the other; for the inexperienced, it is certain}y not a walk for a less than perfectly clear day, nor the place to be when it's windy.

But tyros can avoid it by keeping on the inshore side of the ridge for about 100 yards, and the view out over a vast expanse of briny deep and into some five counties makes every skipped heartbeat worthwhile.In the north of Donegal, the 2,466 foot quartzite cone of Errigal, rising above Dunlewy Lake, is a dominant feature; it is quite easily climbed up the ridge from the road on the east.

An isolated summit, it has fine, expansive views across Altan Lough and Muckish to the north coast and southeast over the stark ruin of Dunlewy Church to the huge, gloomy cirque of the Poisoned Glen, so named, legend has it, because plants toxic to cattle once grew there. Nearby is Glenveagh, a national park that is notable for the very fine herd of red deer it shelters and the superb gardens attached to Glenveagh Castle.

Dublin and Wicklow

Stretching southward from Dublin City, these 1,000 square miles of granite domes and the deep valleys between them including Glencree, Glendalough, and Glenmalure offer some pleasant day hikes. The 1,654-foot summit of Sugar Loaf Mountain, which is easily accessible by bus, stands out as just one example: In the center of an area where the mountains close in on small patches of rolling farmland, it offers fine views out over the sea not far away and, beyond that, on a clear day, all the way to the Welsh mountains.

The ascent begins near Rocky Valley, off the main Dublin-Glendalough road; the descent passes through the wooded Glen of the Downsa steepbanked, 600footdeep ravine that the novelist Sir Walter Scott once termed the most beautiful view he had ever seen.

From Luggala, on the road from Roundwood to Sally Gap, there is a delightful walk down the valley between loughs Tay and Dan, descending through fields on the west of the river, which is crossed via stepping stones, and returning up through the woods on the east. The going is easy, and the views are superb, especially the reflections of the huge Luggala crag in the waters of Lough Tay.

Airport car hire in Ireland

If you are planning to hire a car from the airport at Galway, Dublin, Cork, Shannon or Knock, pre-book car hire before you travel. Ireland is the perfect place to explore by hire car and whatever you fancy doing, the most economical way to get around the countryside and city is by hire car.

Walking in Connemara County Galway

One of Ireland's most scenic and unspoiled regions, Connemara offers its share of the country's best walking. The quartzite pyramids known as the Twelve Bens, which are the most widely known of the peaks here and look like nothing more than minor hills, provide the quality of experience afforded by real mountains because of their cliffbound ridges and slopes of bare rock and scree. (In fact, the north face of 2,336-foot Bencorr offers some of the country's longest rock climbs.) There are several excellent walks in the Bens, but the going is tough, so allow plenty of time.

For instance, the circuit of Glencoaghan, encompassing six fine summits, is only 10 miles long, but it will take a strong walker at least 6 hours. To the east of the Bens is the long chain of the Maumturks, another quartzite range, whose long traverse is one of the greatest walking challenges ireland.

The less ambitious walker should not be put off, however; shorter walks like the one up Diamond Mountain near Letterfrack, easily approached through Connemara National Park, will provide vivid insight into the nature of thIs wonderful wilderness.

The Sandstone Markets

Counties Tipperary and Waterford, Irish Republic: South of Tipperary Town and the rich farmland of the Vale of Aherlow are the Galtee Mountains, a long ridge of peaks that provide pleasant walking, mostly dryshod, with fine views, especially over the northern edge. To the south is the Mitchelstown Valley, with its well-known caves, and beyond, the Knockmealdown Mountains, another pleasant ridge of rounded summits 20 to 25 miles long.

Farther to the east is the Comeragh Plateau, flat and boggy with huge hummocks of peat that would make walking very tiring but for the scenery the lakefilled coums, steepsided cirques carved out in the Ice Age, that fringe the plateau, and the dramatic Coumshingaun headwall that rises almost sheer to 2,500 feet.

The Antrim Coast Northern Ireland

This coast offers a whole range of attractions: the basalt columns of the Giant's Causeway; the high, clean, vertical line of cliffs at Fair Head; the chalk ramparts at Garron Point; the peaceful wooded glens of Glendun and Glenariff; and historic Dunluce Castle, perched on the very edge of the cliffs (so close that the centuries-old story of the kitchen sliding into the sea is almost believable). There is much fenced-off private land here, but all of the sites here can be reached by public footpath.

Guinness and Irish whiskey

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:41:00 +0000

The center of pub life, besides the talk, is the distinctive, robust black beer with a creamy white head known as stout: Rich and full-bodied in taste, it was brewed for the first time in Dublin in 1759 and is now consumed in Ireland to the tune of more than 2 million pints a day about half the beer drunk in the country.

The singer Burl Ives and the Nobel prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck were devotees of stout, of which three different brands are available: Guinness, which is Dublin's brew, made in Europe's biggest brewery, and two stouts from Cork, Beamish & Crawford and Murphy's. Each brand has a distinctive flavor, but even the same make varies from one pub to the next, depending on how the pints are pulled.

Pulling is considered a high art in Ireland: The method by which the brew is put into the glass is paramount; the stout must be left to rest a minute while the glass is partly filled before being topped off, and the excess foam must be wiped off with a ruler or other straight edge, then topped off again so that the drink can be consumed through the creamy foam.

Other factors are equally important, however: the temperature in the cellar where the casks are kept (it must be constant and just so), the distance between cask and tap, and the frequency with which the stout is drawn. It all makes a difference. Certainly, what passes for Guinness stateside would be sent back to the bar straightaway in Ireland.

But stout is not the only drink. There is also Harp, which is brewed in Dundalk, and Smithwick's, the brew for which Ronald Reagan passed up a stout while on a presidential visit to Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, the village of his ancestors. Smithwick's is a bit darker than Harp, but not as dark as stout, and has been made in Kilkenny since 1710 in a brewery on the site of a 12thcentury Franciscan monastery whose Romanesque tower still stands.

In addition, reaching deep into Ireland's drinking past is the fiery white distilled spirit known as poteen (also known as poteen and pronounced putcheen). Many Irish-Americans deeply involved in bootlegging during Prohibition had learned how to distill spirits from making this liquid fire at home in Ireland by boiling together barley, sugar, yeast, and water over a constant flame with the steam running through copper pipe in a barrel of icy water.

It was illegal then and continues to be so, though it is still widely manufactured around Connemara and is sold at about half the price of legal liquor. But if it isn't made with scrupulous care or if it's unscrupulously adulterated with pure alcohol it can be dangerous, so it's wise to avoid it. Whiskey is also traditional, the word itself deriving from the Irish uisge beatha, meaning water of life. (Note that it is spelled with an e, in contrast to Scotch whisky.) Russia's Peter the Great called Irish whiskey the best of all the wines.

Irish whiskey

The top brands are Jameson, Power, Paddy, and Bushmills the last made at a distillery dating from 1608, the world's oldest. Located in a pleasant hamlet that gave the liquor its name, this plant is open on weekdays for tours and samples. In Ireland, whiskey is seldom drunk with ice, and it used to be that ice was simply unavailable in a bar.

A story is told about an American in a rural pub who, requesting his liquor on the rocks, was asked what he meant, and then was told that they had ice in the area only in winter. The American shot is slightly less than the measure (the half one) in the Republic, slightly more than in Northern Ireland, where drinks cost less in any event, especially beer and stout.

In both the Republic and Northern Ireland, hotel residents are entitled to drink outside the legal hours, though availability depends on individual circumstances and staffing. Check with the hotel management beforehand about their own policy regarding legal closing time.

Bars are generally quiet in the daytime, since most people don't usually come out to drink until about 9 in the evening. So to meet a few locals and swap some yarns, late evening is the time to start. But while enjoying the convivial drinking scene until the very moment that the publican's Time, gentlemen, time sounds serious, remember the saying of the wise old seer:

The first cup for thirst, the second for pleasure, the third for intemperance, and the rest for madness. As for getting over the night before, there's nothing quite like a brisk morning walk in the fresh, unpolluted Irish air, preferably by the sea.

Places to visit in Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:38:00 +0000

Connemara and County Galway by hire car

You can drive round County Galway by hire car from the airport in a day and not see it all in a year. This marvelously diverse western shoulder of County Galway has no official boundaries, but Galway Bay on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on another are generally accepted. There are only rough approximations for the rest.

Just beyond the wooded outskirts of Oughterard, the road bends and rises, the trees disappear, and the looming Maamturk Mountains appear ahead. For travellers from Galway, Connemara begins here with this small taste of astonishing geographical diversity.

Farther on, the landscape stretches over bog and lake, one minute wooded and shadowy, the next wild and beautifully stark. The coast is rocky and forbidding, but liberally studded with wide, sandy beaches and hidden, pebbled coves. To make it really your own, ride a Connemara pony along the broad beach at Dog's Bay near Roundstone or on the cliffside fields of Errislannen peninsula.

Or see Connemara from one of its high places, like the Sky Road in Clifden, so called because there's more sky than road. For the really energetic, a climb up Diamond Hill in the Connemara National Park will make you feel master of every bog, island, and inlet spread out at your feet.

County Sligo

Landscape, draped with song and story, inspired the young W. B. Yeats's poetic imagination. His Own legend now clings to those favorite spots, and Glencar Waterfall, the Lake Isle of Inishfree, and the Hazelwood are part of the landscape of great English literature as lovely as the poems they inspired. Yeats's grave, at the foot of Ben Bulben Mountain, is as dramatic a landmark as he intended and an authentic goosebump experience even for non-English majors.

Farther south, however, there is another Yeats landscape, the gentler one surrounding his ancient tower home, Thoor Ballylee in County Galway. Here, where he wrote the mature poems that are the bedrock of his genius, the poet's spirit lingers in the murmur of the little river flowing under the ancient bridge by the tower.

James Joyce and Ireland

Ireland was the country James Joyce loved to hate, but Dublin he simply loved. Never mind that many of the hallowed halls and houses of the hero of Ulysses no longer stand; devoted Joyceans follow Leopold Bloom's minutely described footsteps each Bloomsday, June 16. A visit to the Martello Tower overlooking Dublin Bay at Dun Laoghaire, site of stately, plump Buck Mulligan's blasphemous revels, evokes images of the irreverent master.

Galway Races

The city of Galway is a frenzy during July Race Week, for generations a fixture of this horse-mad country. Though crawling with serious fans, this meet has a holiday air and, sure, you need only know the front of a horse from the back to be part of it all. Sit in the stands to get a good view of both the flat and steeplechase racing. Galwegians, however, find the real craic (meaning fun and pronounced crack) in the popular enclosure, where betting, hawking, and all manner of amusements vie with the horses for attention.

The Burren in County Clare

It means rocky place in Irish, and it is an understatement. Hills and fields formed by slabs of limestone in a rainbow of grays conceal a wealth of tiny wildflowers in their crannies. Rivers flow underground, salt spray mists the stony coast, and tiny pastures form astonishingly fertile grassy oases in the rock. The Burren's unique and fragile ecosystem fascinates serious botanists and naturalists, and captivates the rest of us with its haunting, desolate beauty. Ireland's earliest people lived here and left rings of stones which look full of hidden messages. To walk in the ancient silence, broken by the hum and moan of the wind in the rocks, is to feel them trying to speak.

Golf courses in Ireland

Golf in Ireland is played with something of the spirit of American football, that is, with nearly complete indifference to the weather. At Royal Portrush. Portrush, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, it may hail, rain, or blow, but only darkness will surely clear the course.
The sight of old Dunluce Castle hovering cliffside in the distance is enough to take anyone's mind off the game, if the wind hasn't blown concentration already.

No fear, there's always a warming Bushmill's, Northern Ireland's own whisky from the oldest distiller in the land, to restore the body and soul. Other links we cherish: Royal County Down, more often called Newcastle, makes the most of its proximity to the Mountains of Mourne; in the Republic, Ballybunion's Old Course ranks among the world's elite.

Christianity in Ireland

Christianity came to Ireland in the 5th century and took the country by storm. Tempest-tossed relics of this fervent hurricane litter the country; it is impossible to go very far without seeing a roofless church, usually with a companion round tower, both embraced by a crumbling stone wall. Some, like Clonmacnoise on the river Shannon, restored and carefully labeled, are nearly as busy with visitors and faithful as they were in their heyday.

Others, like Jerpoint Abbey near Thomastown, County Kilkenny, and Kilmacdaugh near Gort, County Galway, stand wrapped in silence. At small ruins like these, get the key from the caretaker as directed by the sign on the gate, and take a few minutes to find the old, worn small faces carved in the walls.

Their simple ancient lines speak of the particular, idiosyncratic kind of faith that still endures in Ireland as nowhere else. Less formal and likely more ancient sacred spots like holy wells and hilltop shrines are known in many country places. A climb up steep, pyramidshaped Croagh Patrick in County Mayo combines devout pilgrimage with that spirit of jovial outing the Irish bring to their religious observances.

Irish monasteries

Monks in Ireland's monasteries kept the lamp of learning flickering through Europe's dark ages, by laboring over manuscripts in their dimly lit towers. Another bookish explosion, which began with the Literary Renaissance in the early part of this century and is still going strong, keeps Irish bookshops well stocked with collectible first editions. Almost any Irish bookstore provides a diverting haven on a rainy day.

A gem like Kenny's on High Street in Galway combines a browser's heaven of old and collectible books and another of prints and maps with an excellent stock of Ireland's contemporary poets and writers. The shop rambles over 5 floors of two back-to-back old Galway houses, and includes a gallery featuring Ireland's best contemporary artists. Each member of the affable Kenny family will happily share his or her expertise or opinion, and while away an afternoon, rainy or otherwise.

Pubs in Ireland

Ireland has 10,500 pubs in the Republic and another 2,000 in the North a pub for every 360 people. There are high class bars in expensive luxury hotels, with modern, tiled WCs, and there are age-darkened country pubs with outside toilets (the state of the toilet being a fair indication of the pub's standard).

A Roscommon establishment, James J. Harlow's Funeral Requisites and Furniture Stores, is at once pub, hardware shop, and gallery of old advertising; Richard MacDonnell's pub in Dingle sells shoes, boots, and leather belts hand-fashioned by the octogenarian proprietor opposite the bar, where he pulls a wonderful pint of Guinness; at Joe McHugh's Bar in the lobter fishing town of Liscannor, County Clare (and at many others like it), it's possible to buy barley sugar, freshly sliced bacon, or a pair of rubber boots along with stout; the Humbert Inn in Castlebar, County Mayo, is crammed with musty memorabilia whips and cudgels from an old English jail, Victorian bottle corkers, and other curiosities.

There are sailors' and fishermen's pubs, expatriates' pubs, pubs with gallows and pubs with gardens, pubs with 90-foot bars, country pubs where the dart board is well used and the tables are marked with the rings of a thousand nights of wetbottomed glasses, city pubs with stained glass and elaborately paneled snugs that have witnessed all manner of clandestine meetings and revolutionary conspiracies in their day.

And that's just the beginning. But no matter what its type, the Irish pub and not the private party is where weddings, christenings, and funerals invariably end in Ireland, with the Guinness flowing like Niagara Falls and the gossip, discussion, banter, jokes, tales, and information flying fast and furiously, as it can only in Ireland. A pub is the poor man's university, says a sign in one of them, and talk is at its heart. So don't be afraid to enter into the spirit of things: Upend a pint or two or three, buy a round for your neighbors, accept one from them when your turn comes, and chat with all assembled. If you need advice, it will come in such torrents that you may be hard put to assimilate it all.

The best way to explore Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:34:00 +0000

Ireland's small size tempts visitors to try to see the entire country in a single trip. The distances look short on a map and the miles seem quite modest, but don't be deceived. 'Trying to get from Killarney to Galway between lunch and dinner means not only rushing through Counties Limerick and Clare, but also missing the entire point of Ireland. The best way to explore Ireland is by hire car, which can be pre-booked at Shannon, Dublin, Cork, Knock or Galway Airport.

True, even at this speed, it is impossible to miss the rainbow of greens, the rainbows themselves, and the otherwise gorgeous skies and scenery. But the whole point of Ireland is her people ancient or living, silent or talkative - their histories and connections.

Everything in Ireland seems built to human scale. Every nook and cranny has its own name, usually linking it with real or imagined former inhabitants. Scenery, however grand, never intimidates visitors, and otherwise forbidding mountains have names that are musical and wonderfully personal - Ben Lettery, Ben Bulben, and Errigal. Cities and towns are more hospitable to pedestrians than to drivers, and can be walked thoroughly with little strain. Even cosmopolitan Dublin feels cozy for a city.

Car rental in Ireland

Car rental in Ireland can be pre-booked from the airport at Shannon, Galway, Knock, Cork or Dublin, and getting around by hire car definitely has its advantages.

The Irish concept of time is unique and elastic; it often feels imprecise to Americans. In every transaction, there is always time for a chat. Anything after noon can be evening; revels of all types start late and go long into the night - making a night of it means the whole night. Take your time in Ireland and pretty Soon you'll think you have far more of it. Here is just a sampling of the unique experiences that make a visit to Ireland pure magic:

The Abbey Theatre in Dublin

When the Abbey, Dublin's most famous theatre, offers productions of plays by early Irish playwrights like Synge, O'Casey, or cofounder W. B. Yeats himself, these classics open the Irish heart and mind to a visitor.

The Abbey is not the sole keeper of the keys to the kingdom, however. Check local theatres around the country like the Druid Theatre and An Taibdhearc in Galway, the Hawks Well in Sligo, and the Guildhall in Derry for renditions of Irish drama from Wilde and Synge to Brian Friel and Tom Murphy. The level of talent - both professional and amateur is exemplary, the theaters intimate, and the sound of Irish voices absolutely magical.

Irish pubs

It is not uncommon for Irish vacationers travelling, say, from Dublin to Clifden, a nonstop drive of about 5 hours, to shorten the road with a few stops at favourite pubs along the way.

They pause as much for spiritual as for liquid refreshment, to take the local conversational temperature as it varies from County Meath to County Roscommon to County Galway. Behind the wheel, all is speed, dash, and more than a little daring. Be assured, however, Irish travellers know how to take their time, pausing to savour a chat more than the scenery.

For American visitors, the English language in the mouth of an Irish man, woman, or child sounds like a marvellous new tongue. Few words are rarely used when more will do; colour rather than precision is the rule. A pub stop for directions may not clarify the way, but it will illuminate the country.

Things to do in Ireland

You may park next to a petrol pump, squeeze past bundles of peat and bags offeed and fertilizer, and be distracted by shelves of groceries, but be assured there is a bar in there somewhere. Country pubs are rural Ireland's answer to the minimall, invented before the question was even asked, and usually crammed into a space too small to swing a cat. Locals arrive by foot or on bikes, buy milk, bread, and bacon, and have a sociable sip before heading back down their own boreen (a tiny, unpaved lane).

A wonderfllly workable Irish solution to after-hours shopping is the family-owned pub attached to a grocery store. No matter that the shop is dark and long closed, nor that it appears to be a separate entity. A polite inquiry to the barman (and the patience to wait while he attends to the more important business of dispensing pints) will yield the milk or bread or other necessity. If he's very busy, he might just open the door to the shop, tell you to get what you want, and pay at the bar on the way out.

Galway Bay oysters

Let there be oysters under the sea or in this case, Galway Bay and there will be no question of there being love. Smallish and tasting like a sweet smack of the sea, these exquisitely fresh oysters deserve frequent sampling, and are best washed down with a tall jar of Guinness stout. When September heralds their months once again, the folks in Galway celebrate with an Oyster Festival: 2 days of partying that leave visitors feeling they have been celebrating for a month. Happily, another Irish delectable, smoked salmon, is available year-round.

Aficionados ask for wild rather than farmed salmon, but when it's well smoked, it is often hard to tell the difference. Enamoured visitors have been known to eat smoked salmon scrambled into their breakfast eggs, on slabs of brown bread and butter at lunch, and then again as a starter before dinner all in the same day. Interrupt the seaborne goodies with liberal doses of native cheeses, most of them handmade, all creamy rich and fresh air infused.

Known as farmhouse cheeses, they are made in small batches, usually on the same farm as the goats and cows that produced the raw ingredients. In good restaurants and small grocery stores, look for names like Cashel Blue from County Tipperary, Ireland's answer to Stilton; Lough Caum, a creamy goat cheese from County Clare; or Milleens, a soft cow's milk cheese from County Cork. When in doubt, be sure to try anything made nearby.

County Mayo Ireland

A Georgian house, seen in a country setting, emphasizes all the restrained grace of the genre: the solemn, unadorned (but pleasing) geometry of the facade concealing some architectural delight within. At Newport House, a hospitable country-house hotel in the little village of Newport, County Mayo, one delight is an elegant lantern a kind of domed skylight which admits a lovely light down to the sweeping staircase beneath. During the 1800s, it was as likely to illuminate tweeds and guns and waders as ball gowns.

Speaking of waders, the fishing here has an air of the Georgian era as well. Large sections of the Newport River belong exclusively to the manor, a bit of droit du seigneur in the late 20th century. Stroll along its rippling banks, casting for salmon or sea trout, and feel that it is yours alone.

Weather in Ireland

It's not exactly raining, but the wipers are on; you don't need an umbrella, but your feet are getting wet. The Irish have many onomatopoeic expressions for precipitation it may be showering, lashing, belting, or even pissing but none so apt as soft. A soft day magically lights up the landscape, for the wet veil over the sun casts a special glow. You may not see the distant mountains standing atop the garden steps of Powerscourt, but the flower borders bloom incandescently and the shadowy ruin of the house comes alive again.

Soft days fur the trees and rock walls with mosses, stud the hedgerows with tiny ferns, and transfonn a country lane into a glade full of magical life. A soft day makes travelers slow down, look about for a rainbow, and understand the genesis of Irish tweed.

The Irish craik

The Irish craik is well known throughout the world as meaning a `great time` and there is nowhere better to enjoy the craik than in Dublin. Hire a car from Dublin Airport, Galway Airport, Shannon Airport, Cork Airport or Sligo Airport and make the most of the Irish countryside and cities.

Irish tweeds

Irish tweeds perfectly capture the hazy blues and myriad greens, the luminous grays, the dashes of bright fuchsia, and the golden flicker of gorse and lichen on the rocks. Anything made from this sturdy, appealing fabric stands up well however soft the weather, and keeps the wearer dry and cozy (but not burdened). County Donegal is practically a synonym for tweed, and while all manner of tweed items are sold throughout the country, a special cachet lingers over a jacket or skirt purchased on its home ground. Companies like Magee's and John Molloy still employ home weavers throughout the county, and include the craftsman's name in the garment label.

Other counties have their own claims to tweed fame: Millar's in Clifden, County Galway, weaves tweed blankets as distinctive as the Connemara landscape; Avoca Weavers, whose home is in County Wick low, captures the soft rainbow colors of Ireland's garden; nontraditional weavers like Helena Ruuth in Dublin combine silks and linens in a misty Irish palette. Best get one of each.

Irish music and dance

Ireland's music, ladenwith the country's heartbreaking history, ironically inspires the most extraordinarily cheerful evenings.Each part of Ireland has its song, from The Rose of Alandale to The Fields of Athenry; from Dublin in the Rare Old Times to The Mountains of Mourne to The West's Awake. Pubs like the King's Head in Galway City, the Corner Stone in Lahinch, County Clare, O'Connor's in Doolin, County Clare, or Mannion's in Clifden, County Galway, post signs announcing Traditional Music Tonight.

Informal playing, however called a session is common at these and countless other pubs. Impromptu songfests are the Irish version of a digestif at private parties, as well as at country hotels like the Rock Glen, near Clifden, County Galway.

Every Irish man, woman, and child has a party piece; and everyone participates, entertaining each other with a gusto that feels like television was never invented. Sessions go late into the night, kept afloat with lashings of spirits and pints.

Resist the impulse to retire at a sensible hour, be sure to take a turn buying a round of drinks, and don't worry about being in good voice. Participation counts much more than talent, and the hospitable Irish will likely break into New York, New York or I Left My Heart in San Francisco in reciprocal delight at your contribution.

Food and Drink in Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:27:00 +0000

Ireland's location and climate have combined to produce an agricultural abundance: Its lush grasslands support a thriving livestock idustry, resulting in good beef, lamb, and pork; its extensive waters yield a fine harvest of fish and seafood: sole, plaice, mackerel, sea trout, salmon, lobster and crab, prawns and scallops, oysters and mussels; its Soil and mild climate nurture barley, wheat, sugar beets, and potatoes as well as other vegetables, when Irish farmers can be persuaded to grow them.

At its best, Irish food is fresh, nourishing, and prepared simply. There are several regional variations and a few local specialties, but the real geographical division is between the coast and the interior. On the coast, which is heavily visited by travellers, food is on the whole good and its presentation attractive. The flat heart of the country has barely emerged from the dark English provinclal ages that dominated food in Ireland for a century and a half.

The timing of meals in Ireland is Important. The Irish food day is divided into three main meals and almost as many side events. The weight-conscious visitor will sImply have to pick and choose and try to be selective.

Irish breakfast

A typical Irish breakfast starts with porridge (a flavorsome boiled oatmeal topped with cream) and continues through a main course of bacon and eggs accompanied by grilled tomatoes, toast, and orange marmalade. The eggs may be cooked any style and the bacon is good although not crisp. A black or whIte pudding (both are kinds of blood pudding) or even kidney or liver may accompany the meal.

A breakfast alternative offered on the coast is plaice, a delicate-tasting fish, or fresh mackerel if they are running. Try both for a new and delightful breakfast experience.Instead of toast a coarse, wholemeal 'brown bread homebaked, nutty, and deltcious or soda bread plain white, usually made without raisins may be served.

To dine or not to dine is a big question for the traveller. For most Irish people, particularly those in the countryside, luncheon is the main meal, taken about 1 0'clock, and usually consists of soup, meat (beef or chicken), vegetables (peas, cabbage, carrots, and usually potatoes), and dessert (the Irish call them sweets), generally puddings or pastries. Here or there, a visitor may encounter carrageen sweets, moulded jelly with extract of Irish moss, a species of seaweed, flavored with lemon rind and served with heavy cream or fruit.

They are mild and subtle and entirely pleasant. Cheese is often offered as an alternative to dessert. Irish cheese is good and some hotels have a tempting cheese board that includes French and other European varieties. Visitors staying with an Irish family should follow custom others can do as they Iike. Most hotels and resaurants feature a formal midday meal, and a saving grace is that although It is fundamentally the same meal as that served in the evening, it costs up to 50% less.

The alternatives to a full hot lunch are luckily multiplying in Ireland. Hotel coffee shops or lounges will serve cold plates of smoked salmon, chicken, salads, or sandwiches. The Irish pub which hitherto concentrated on one thing, drink is gradually extending its menu from sandwiches (which are thin and bready by American standards) to include soup, cold plates, salads, and hot meat pies. These meals are indicated by signs that say pub grub.

Or visitors may prefer to skip lunch and sustain themselves until the main evening meal by having afternoon tea. This fine English institution is, like many other colonial relics, slowly fading from Ireland. Afternoon tea is undeniably a spiritual refreshment; it can rise to ritual, however, when it include delicate finger sandwiches of ham, chicken, or cucumber; strips of toast WIth honey; chocolate eclairs; heavy fruitcakes; or wedges of apple tart with cream.

The domestic Irish evening dinner meal is usually called tea or supper high tea to distinguish it verbally from the afternoon version. In winter it might be quite a substantial meal a mixed grill (sausage, bacon, kidney, a small pIece of steak, and a lamb chop), steak and potatoes, or fish in the coastal areas; in summer, it may be something lighter, such as boiled eggs with toast, bread and jam, or a plate of sliced cold chicken or ham. Tea is rounded off with cake, a fruit tart, pudding, or scones.

Among the traditional Irish dishes not to be missed are oxtail soup, Irish stew ( layers of onion, potato, and mutton), and fresh salmon when in season for which the country is justifiably famous. Seafood, surprisingly, has only recently become popular in Ireland, though the coastal waters abound with prawns, lobster, mussels, and oysters. Each October, at the beginning of the oyster harvest, a festival is held in Galway City, during which bushels of bivalves meet their doom in a deluge of porter (a dark beer).

Briefly thereafter, oysters become available in the shops. Another delicacy sometimes served in restaurants is the periwinkle, a tiny sea snail that is boiled, picked from in the shell with sewing needles or wooden pikes, and eaten.

Dipped in melted butter laced with garlic, the winkle need not blush before the escargot. At fairs or horse races, little bags of dried seaweed are often sold as though it were candy; this is dulse, and it makes a tasty, salty chaw a fine accompaniment to a glass of stout.

Drinks in Ireland

This brings us to the subject of drink. The favoured beverage is stout, or porter, a dark, pungent brew served by the jar, with a head like thick cream and a reputation for being able to support life single-handedly. Guinness is the largest brewer, though other brands are locally obtainable outside Dublin.

Good lager and ale, like stout, are drawn at room temperature; the Irish regard the American custom of taking such beverages icy cold with the wry detachment of the anthropologist. They privately think it is a custom suitable only for savages. A dash of sweetened lime juice in a glass of beer makes a refreshing drink.

If you are thinking of hiring a car at Dublin, Cork, Shannon, Galway or Knock Airport, you can book car rentals before you fly. You may want to leave the hire car at your hotel if you are planning an Irish pub crawl, but this is the perfect way to get around if you want to explore the countryside and cities of Ireland.

Most Irish bartenders do not mix drinks, but will sell small bottles of mixers at an extra charge. The spirits of choice are gin, Scotch, and Irish whiskey. The whiskey distributed for home consumption is far smoother than the youthful export stuff, though of slightly lower proof. It is, like the great malt whiskeys of Scotland, a straight liquor, unblended, and it has a distinctive fruity bouquet and trace of sweetness. In recent years, wines have become a popular potable in Ireland, and although only small quantities of wine are produced in the country, a wide assortment of European vintages, as well as selections from as far away as Chile and Australia, are available.

California wines, including nonalcoholic varieties, also have gained acceptance in the Irish marketplace. Don't miss a chance to sample that famous after-dinner treat Irish coffee, a tantalizing concoction of hot coffee and whiskey topped with a thick layer of gently whipped cream. (For a more complete discussion of beers, ales, and liquors, as well as a selection of the best watering holes in Ireland.

Irish music and dance

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:24:00 +0000

The harp is the instrument most associated with Ireland from ancient times; it was used for centuries by learned bards who entertained the royal Gaelic courts with recitations of poetry and sagas. After the dissolution of the Gaelic courts ordered by the Cromwellian Act of Settlement in 1652, the bards scattered to the countryside, where they mingled with folk poets, and a general intermarriage of their styles ensued. The classical airs that evolved from such collaboration The Coolun, Roisin Dubh, and Eileen Aroon present a refinement and gravity uncommon in folk music.

Turlough O Carolan

The harpists traveled among the houses of the rural gentry, playing traditional songs and creating new ones on commission. The greatest of these harpists was Turlough O'Carolan (1670-1738), whose compositions wed a certain European sophistication (perhaps acquired in Dublin) with a native Irish sensibility: Though his melodies are quite lengthy and complex, they also flirt now and again with the popular gapped scales, never losing touch with the folk spirit. Some have become staples of modern Irish ensembles. Another instrument always associated with Ireland is the bagpipe.

Irish bagpipes

The uilleann (pronounced illen) pipes differ from those played in Scotland in that the bellows is pumped with the elbow, a softer reed is used, the drones are slung across the leg of the seated player, and there are keys that change the drone notes when depressed with the heel of the right hand, enabling the player to produce chords.

The uilleann has been called the Irish organ, for it is capable of extremely rich, resonant sound, though with its straps and harnesses it resembles an instrument of torture. The west of Ireland, particularly County Clare, was until recently the home of fine Irish piping; but the recent rise in popularity of Irish music throughout the world has persuaded numbers of young Irish (who might otherwise have belabored guitars) to take up the arduous study of this noble and exacting instrument.

Traditional irish dance music

While traditional dance music is played on pipes as well as fiddles, the big airs the slow and majestic classical tunes are especially moving when played on the expansive pipes. Although the older generation of pipers has passed away, many recordings of such great pipers as Willy Clancy and Leo Rowesome still are available. The McPeakes of Belfast were three generations of harpers, pipers, and singers led by Frank McPeake, reputed to have been the first piper skilled enough to sing to his own accompaniment.

Three of the best pipers were Paddy Maloney, of the Chieftains; Finbar Furey, of the Furey Brothers; and the virtuoso Joe McKenna. The piper produces the melody trills, grace notes, and other flourishes by moving his fingers to open or close the holes of the chanter, or pipe. Flutes and pennywhistles are played in the same way, without tonguing. The great Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman, who emigrated to America and recorded there in the 1920s, evolved a similar ornamental style for his instrument, one which has since become the standard.

Jigs reels and hornpipes

The musical embellishments used by fiddlers, pipers, flutists, and pennywhistlers perfectly suit the structure of Irish dance music the jigs, reels, and hornpipes in which a sinuous and fluid melody rushes along with scarcely a pause for breath, diving and soaring with dizzying exuberance. The stuttering throb of the bodhnin (a handheld drum beaten with a doubleheaded stick) gives the music an irresistible rhythmic momentum more like jazz or flamenco than anything in the other Celtic musical traditions.

The music of County Kerry tends to be less hectic and more regularly cadenced than that of the rest of the country. Some scholars believe it represents an older style. Polkas and schottisches (a Scottish country dance), not found elsewhere in Ireland, are performed in Kerry, as are longer, more elegant dances. A fine example of the latter, which will seem more classical and less Irish to the average listener and more like the harp music of Carolan, is the work of Eugene O'Donnell, the fiddler.

Music in Connemara

The Connemara region on Ireland's far western coast, a rocky and forbidding region north of Galway City, is famous for its singers and for its stately, mysterious ballads. The vocal technique resembles that of piping and Sligo fiddling; some of the notes are changed or the tempo slowed, and the melody is delivered with a multitude of embellishments. The effect can be quite fascinating, as if one were listening to dance music in slow. motion. The recordings of Jue Heaney of Carna provide excellent examples of the ballad style.

Travelling around in Ireland

Whether you want to experience the music and dance in Connemara, Galway, Limerick, or Dublin, you should pre-book airport car hire to pick up when you arrive at Dublin, Belfast or Knock Airport. This will save you time and money and enable you to move from region to region without any hassle.

Ensembles of singers or musicians are not traditional in Ireland. Solo playing was the rule until the 1920s when record companies began to demand lively and audible renditions of dance tunes to supply the dance market in America; this prompted musicians to seek accompanists.

During the 1950s, Sean O'Riada, a serious composer and harpsichordist, hearing the ceifdhe (pronounced kaylee) dance bands that had begun to form and sounded, as someone wrote, like a tree full of blackbirds, conceived the idea of arranging Irish music for an orchestra of traditional instruments.

He gathered a group of fiddlers, pipers, accordionists, whistlers, flutists, and drummers in Dublin and taught them their parts by ear (few could read music). The delightful result was Ceolteori Cualain, the first sophisticated folk music ensemble, for whom O'Riada provided many orchestrations that though they were enriched with harmonies, counterpoint, even rudimentary fugues never lost their simplicity and drive.

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem

During the 1960s, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem found an audience among folk music fans in America and introduced them to a species of Irish music worlds away from Mother Macree and the other products of the Hibernian division of Tin Pan Alley. Their repertoire included revolutionary and patriotic songs (as well as that pungent Irish subgenre, the antiwar song), sea chanteys, and children's songs, all of them delivered with robust good humour and taste. Since the disappearance of the harpers in the 19th century, music had rarely been a professional undertaking among the Irish, but the Clancys stimulated a new interest, and before long Ireland was in the midst of a ballad boom.

The Dubliners

Among the more successful groups were the Dubliners, a group of four later five men including Ronny Drew, a flamenco guitarist and master of the Dublin street ballad, and Barney McKenna, a wizard who pioneered the application of the Sligo style to the tenor banjo. The Dubliners have proved to be a durable institution, though, like most Irish musicians who want to earn a living by their art, they have had to seek audiences in England and on the Continent.

After the death of Sean O'Riada, a party of his alumni formed the Chieftains to carry on his style and bring it to a wider audience. They tightened the O'Riada sound and began running tunes together in patchwork medleys, sometimes juxtaposing contrasting sounds for dramatic effect. The Chieftains fathered a generation of such ensembles in Ireland and Scotland as well as America, where Celtic bands have begun to proliferate.

Among the best Irish bands were Planxty, Sweenys Men, the Bothy Band, and De Danann; they preserve the charm and melodic richness of traditional music but deliver it with the instrumental daring and emotional impact of rock.

Georgian architecture and the common dwellings of Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:22:00 +0000

Georgian architecture was also popular, and elegant Georgian squares gracious greens presided over by tall brick townhouses with pillared doorways and distinctive fanlights appeared not only in Dublin (Fitzwilliam and Merrion Squares), but also in Limerick City (Newtown Pery) and in Belfast (Donegall Square). Neoclassicism remained in vogue during the 19th century, although Irish architects also fliited briefly with various revivals of the Gothic style (St. Finbarre's Cathedral in Cork), Italianate (the Custom House in Belfast), and Edwardian (Belfast City Hall).

The common dwellings of Ireland remained virtually unchanged from earliest Celtic times: They were usually only one room heated by a central fireplace that vented its smoke through a hole in the roof. Stables and byres were built adjacent, although animals sometimes shared the livoing quarters for warmth.

The central hearth style with hipped roof was most common In the eastern counties, while homes in the northwest had a bed alcove and room extensions. In the southwest, gables appeared, rising above the thatching, which replaced stone as the common roofing material. Two-storey dwellings did not appear until the late 19th century, when, after the depopulatIon caused by the famine, efforts were made to eliminate the thatch-roofed cottages altogether and replace them with more modern accommodatIons.

Shannon Airport car hire

Most visitors who hire a car from Shannon Airport, can explore the diverse landscapes of Ireland and many departing visitors, whose route back to Shannon Airport takes them through Adare, County Limerick, can see an especially pretty row of thatch-roofed houses on their way through town, and chances are they'll also see a thatcher at work, because the roofs are meticulously kept.

The traditional style has also been revived somewhat in villages of thatchroofed cottages with open fireplaces and flagstone floors, as well as electricity, modern heating, and plumbing built for the use of vacationers.

But more than likely, what the visitor will remember most is the haunting picture of the same simple dwellings scattered frlorn and deserted throughout the Irish countryside, left to decay when their owners left for a better life elsewhere. The history of Ireland is indeed told in its architecture.

James Joyce and Irish prose

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:18:00 +0000

The play is punctuated by songs that lampoon Irish piety, by dances and jokes, and, finally, by the gunfire of a police raid in which the hostage is tragically killed, Characters frequently address the audience, the accompanist remains onstage throughout, and no pretense is made that this is anything but theater; yet it captures the emotions anyway, having dispensed with every theatrical convention except the heart's truth.

James Joyce (1882-1941), the titan of Irish prose, exempted himself from the Literary Renaissance he referred to Yeats's Celtic Twilight as the Cultic Toilette and at age 22 expatriated himself to the Continent. He took with him a handsome but intellectually unprepossessing shopgirl,

Nora Barnacle, who became for him the personification of Dublin, in the environs of which Joyce set everything he ever wrote, Joyce's insistence on fixing his most obscure works to the real, even trivial, details of the city he remembered amounted to the most creative obsession in modern letters.

As a young man, growing up in a middle class, home, educated in Catholic prep schools and at Trinity College, Joyce had been attracted to the realism of Ibsen and learned Norwegian to read his plays in the original tongue, Ulysses, the huge novel that established Joyce's pre-eminent reputation, follows Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew, his wife, Molly, and young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's surrogate, in their minut-by-minute progress through a single day June 16, 1904 in Dublin. Joyce employed a stream of consciousness technique to record the random associations of his characters' thoughts. Readers were shocked by the eroticism of these interior monologues, and the book was until quite recently banned in Ireland.

James Joyce and Dublin

Yet Dubliners who managed to obtain copies were fascinated by the many living personalities parading across the pages and by the accuracy with which Joyce had observed and remembered the city, its features, and its speech. What few realized was how brilliantly Joyce had transformed the details of Dublin life newspaper articles from June 16, 1904, brand-name household goods, idioms of local patois into symbols of Europe's mythological and psychic heritage represented by The Odyssey, the novel's controlling metaphor.

Nor do many readers appreciate Joyce's love for his characters until Molly Bloom's long interior soliloquy on the edge of sleep, On Bloomsday, June 16 of every year, dedicated Joyceans gather in Dublin to retrace the routes followed by Ulysses's characters: from the Martello tower (a Napoleonicera fortress) where Joyce, like Stephen Dedalus, lived briefly in his student days, through the city, past nearly every point of interest or importance, to Eccles Street, where the Blooms resided.

Fans of Joyce's next and last book, Finnegans Wake, are rather few. It is probably the most frustrating and impenetrable book ever written, for language itself is the subject Nearly everyone of the book's 237,600 words has several meanings at once. Joyce, master of almost every European language, enlisted them all to create this huge stream•of•consciousness work the sleeping, dreaming thought flow of the Earwicker family of Dublin, whose matriarch, Ann (known also as Anna Livia Plurabelle), is at once the spirit of the river Liffey and the form of the book.

Joyce's works belong to the Red Branch line comic, cosmic, larger than life but Samuel Beckett (1906-89), briefly his secretary in the 1930s and another Dublin expatriate who lived on the Continent, beldngs to no tradition, though he shows the influence of Joyce and Synge. A founding member of the avantgarde and Ireland's third Nobel Prize winner (after Yeats and Shaw), Beckett's enigmatic plays and novels seem less overtly Irish than the works of his compatriot, although here and there in Waiting for Godot one hears echoes of the Irish music hall, and the astute reader or listener will realize that Play is set in Foxrock, a Dublin suburb. Beckett, the quintessential absurdist, displays in works as dauntingly obtuse in starkness as Finnegans Wake the characteristic daring and individualism of the Irish.

Modern Ireland and famous writers

Ireland has dispensed fine writing to the world this is no provincial tradition with astonishing abundance in this century. Among the lesser• known luminaries, some of whom have fallen into the shadows of the gods, are Frank O'Connor, memoirist, essayist, translator, and chronicler nonpareil of literary Ireland; Patrick Kavanagh, Ireland's only beat poet; Louis Macneice, the Belfast poet; Flann O'Brien (At Swim Two Birds), surrealist virtuoso; Denis O'Donoghue, the literary critic; playwrights Brian Friel and Hugh Leonard, who have enjoyed notable successes on Broadway; poets Thomas Kinsella John Montague, Derek Mahon, and Seamus Heaney; and, to run on and on, Padraic Colum, J. P.

Dunleavey (who also writes under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen), Denis Johnstone, Iris Murdoch, Brian Moore, Edna O'Brien, Liam O'Flaherty, Sean O'Faolain ... as though all the vital energies of the nation, pent up through 700 years of oppression, were erupting. The spectacle of the Irish literary explosion is without parallel in history.

Irish architecture

Ireland is full of picturesque ruins and ancient structures, which are I part of its charm for Americans unaccustomed to architecture older than a few centuries. Along every Irish road and river lie Stone Age tombs, ruined abbeys, decayed or restored castles, Palladianstyle manor houses, and stately Georgian mansions.

And the thatch-roofed and whitewashed or fieldstone cottages in the remoter regions are most appealing for their timeless, homespun simplicity.

County Donegal and County Sligo

The oldest structures, some of which have been dated to 3000 BC, are the megalithic monuments the tumuli and stone circles at Carrow more in County Donegal and Carrow keel in County Sligo; the passage grave complex at Brugh na Boinne in County Meath; and the decorated standing stones and dolmens scattered about the countryside.

Whether these monuments were built by an indigenous people or by immigrants is not known, but they are similar to those found in Europe and England (Stonehenge is perhaps the best-known example). It is thought that these structures were prehistoric shrines and that the Celts, who began arriving in Ireland around 500 BC, also endowed the sites with religious or magical significance.

The earliest Celtic structures are the duns, fortresses enclosed by drystone walls and often built atop megalithic shrines or ring forts. The walls served both to keep cattle in and to protect the settlement from attack. The most famous and impressive of the fortresses is Dun Aengus on the Aran isle of Inishmore in Galway Bay.

Dun Aengus

Dun Aengus is a semi-circle; its open side is a cliff that drops precipitously 266 feet to the roiling Atlantic, giving the impression that the missing half of the circle had collapsed into the ocean in some terrible cataclysm. Other notable ringed fortresses include Tara in County Meath and Griamin of Aileach in County Donegal.

Early Celtic dwellings were built of timber and wattle and have not survived. In treeless areas people lived in stone dwellings; their clochfms (beehive huts) were constructed in corbeled fashion, with the stones overlapping each other. The early Christian churches were also built in the beehive style, although some variations were introduced such as a rectangular shape and a pitched roof. Two examples are Skellig Michael, off the Kerry coast, and the Gallarus Oratory in County Kerry; both are thought to date from the 8th century.

The round tower is another relic of early Christian architecture. Ranging in height from 70 to 120 feet, slightly tapered, and topped by a conical roof, these were bell towers as well as places of refuge from the attacks of Viking invaders. (The doorway was located high above the ground; when besieged, inhabitants withdrew the adjoining ladder for safety.) A fine example of an early Christian round tower is the freestanding 11 thcentury structure at Glendalough in County Wicklow.

Monastic architecture in Ireland

Irish monastic and ecclesiastic architecture further developed with the introduction to Ireland of the Romanesque style during the 12th century. It was embraced with some enthusiasm by native artisans, and ornate stone carvings human and animal heads, chevrons, interlace, and foliagedecorate the arches, doorways, capitals, and sometimes windows of the churches of this period. The Chapel of Cormac, situated on the Rock of Cashel in County Tipperary, is the earliest Irish Romanesque structure in the country, and Clonfert Cathedral in County Galway is perhaps the most ornate; both have heavily embellished portals.

Airport car rentals in Ireland

Airport car rentals and car hire can be pre-booked from the airport in Ireland, and if you want to enjoy the diverse architecture and places of interest in Ireland, you should take your time to drive around the cities and countryside, including Dublin, Limerick and Galway.

The Normans and Irish architecture

The invasion of the Normans in 1170 changed the face of Irish architecture forever, for they brought with them from England and Wales the designs and styles, proportions, shapes, and decorative devices prevalent there. Eager to colonize, they began a flurry of cathedral and castle building that lasted from the 12th to the 17th century. The numerous churches constructed during this period tended to be large and Gothic in style, with tall lancet windows and pointed arches; St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin is a fine example. The typical Norman fortress had a square stone keep enclosed by curtain walls linking four circular corner towers.

King Johns Castle in Limerick City

King John's Castle in Limerick City, built in 1210, combines all of these features. The towerhouse, a structure favored by both Norman and native Irish, dates from the 15th to the 17th century. Most of them were built, however,just after the Statute of 1429, which offered a £10 subsidy to any person building such a tower within the Pale. The so-called £ 10 houses were fortified dwellings built of stone, four or five stories high, with narrow slitted windows and steeply pitched roofs. A very simple Norman-built towerhouse is Donore Castle in County Meath.

During the late 17th century, domestic dwellings began to look less like fortresses and more like the classical mansions popular in England. This meant that houses were often built of brick, with hipped roofs and dormer windows, as exemplified by Beaulieu in County Louth. Very soon, however, the Irish and English imagination was captured by Palladianism, a re-interpretation of the design principles evolved by Italian architect Andrea Palladio in the mid-16th century. The arrangement of columns and arches in the facade of Bellamont Forest in County Cavan is a typical Palladian motif.

Architecture in Dublin Cork Belfast Limerick and Waterford

The 18th century saw the architectural expansion and enhancement of Ireland's urban centers Belfast, Cork, Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford. During this period Dublin received a heady endowment of new buildings designed in the classical style incorporating elements from ancient Greek and Roman architecture such as Trinity College, the Four Courts, the Custom' House, and the Parliament buildings (now the Bank of Ireland).

WB Yeats and Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:15:00 +0000

But the burgeoning political and literary movement did not achieve the status of a renaissance until the appearance of the work of W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), whose early imitations of folk poetry grafted French symbolism onto Irish folklore. Introduced to the Ulster cycle by his friend and patroness of the Irish Literary Renaissance, Lady (Augusta) Gregory, Yeats became fascinated by the figure of Cu Chulainn and meditated on this image of the kind of reckless and heroic action he admired but shrank from in many poems.

Son of an atheist father, the portraitist J. B. Yeats, grandson of the dandyish Church of Ireland rector at Drumcliffe, County Sligo, brother of the expressionist painter Jack Yeats William Butler Yeats was an unlikely Irishman. He was a member of various occult societies, an admirer of the English and a defender of the Ascendancy, a member of London literary society, and, in his youth, one of those bohemian aesthetes whose tastes and style were schooled by the lyrical poetry of A. C. Swinburne, the humanist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the heroic fantasies of William Morris.

Yet he was also an ardent supporter of Charles Parnell, briefly a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, and a student of Irish folklore. Debarred from religious belief by the skepticism inherited from his father, Yeats invented a personal cosmology in which the clash and union of opposites, represented by the phases of the moon, became the dynamic force in history. (By opposition, square and trine , he says in the poem In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.) The great poems of his middle years take their intellectual structure from this esoteric and enchantingly bizarre mythology, which perfectly expressed the contradictions of his own nature.

Passionately attached to the peasantry, in whom he saw the wellspring ofIreland's creative energy, Yeats was equally passionately the champion of the Ascendancy, whom he regarded as Ireland's intellectual elite capable of giving coherent shape to the emotions of the masses.

WB Yeats and the later years

In his last years he abandoned his highly personalized mysticism to return with new freedom to the subject matter of his earliest days. Pathologically shy, Yeats was nevertheless proud and a trifle vain of his striking good looks. He became one of Ireland's leading public men and it was, ironically, this status rather than his years of obsession with mysticism and folklore that inspired his greatest poem, Among School Children, with its famous last line, How can we know the dancer from the dance? Yeats often found himself embroiled in controversy because of the parochialism of the Dublin public, whose tastes were circumscribed by oppression and a conservative church.

Yeats's own verse was not the source of his troubles; rather it was his defense of his friends and colleagues Synge, Joyce, O'Casey William Butler Yeats is buried at the churchyard of Drumcliff, County Sligo, Ireland. Car hire in Ireland can be booked from the airport at Dublin or Belfast or Knock before you travel, and it provides the cheapest way to get around Ireland and see the sights.

That he was a patriot, albeit an eccentric one, a celebrant of the Easter Rising, and, in his youth, a slightly uncomfortable agitator, did not go unrewarded; in 1922 he was appointed a senator of the Irish Free State. In debate, he spoke magnificently and pugnaciously against censorship and also against the constitutional prohibition of divorce, which he characterized as an insult to the Protestant minority.

The Abbey Theatre Ireland

He helped to found the Abbey Theatre, now a national institution, but when angry mobs stormed the stage, infuriated at a reference to women's undergarments in Synge's Playboy of the Western World, Yeats stepped before the curtains and sternly reproached them. When they did it 20 years later over the appearance of a prostitute in O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars, Yeats confronted the mobs a second time, booming at them: You have disgraced yourselves again! Ireland loves drama, and Yeats provided drama in abundance. In return, Ireland grudgingly offered him its adoration for the splendour and valour of his quixotic idealism.

Yeats believed that great poetry must be rooted in place, and The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Fiddler of Dooney, The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland, and others of his early poems are set close to Sligo Town.

But the most important landmarks in his verse are Knocknarea, atop of which stands the pile of stones known as Queen Maeve's Cairn, and Ben Bulben, the limestone mesa across Sligo Bay. Between these two mountains, spectral horsemen called Dananns were said to ride each night: The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of CloothnaBare; Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away.(The Hosting of the Sidhe, ca. 1899)

To these horsemen, Yeats, buried in Drumcliffe churchyard at the foot of Ben Bulben, addressed himself in his epitaph:Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! (Under Ben Bulben, 1938)

Yeats and the Nobel Prize

Yeats's work is among the glories of modern literature (he won the Nobel Prize in 1923), yet he was unstintingly generous and supportive of other writers. He encouraged the younger Anglo-Irish writer John Millington Synge to rediscover his roots by visiting the Aran Islands in Galway Bay.

Synge's sojourn on Inishmaan, as well as in other Irish-speaking regions, inspired him to combine the realism of Ibsen with the wild, fantastical speech of the Irish countryside in plays that treated the life of Ireland's impoverished rural proletariat with Chekhovian irony and unsentimental honesty. Synge never romanticized, and his plays have no heroes. Christy Mahon, protago The Hosting of the Sidhe, from The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats.

In The Playboy of the Western World, he finds himself suddenly a celebrity in a strange village after confessing to the murder of his own father and the object, thanks to his prestige, of the affections of Pegeen Mike, the daughter of a publican. When Christy proves innocent of the crime, Pegeen turns on him in a paroxysm of disappointment because, having shown himself to be more tender than wicked, he lacks the notoriety to elevate her life beyond its drudgery; in the last line of the play, having lost her only playboy of the western world, she realizes, too late, that she loves him.

In Riders to the Sea, set in the Aran Islands, an old woman accepts the drowning of her last surviving son with a chilly stoicism that is at once tragic and appalling. Synge's is a vision without comfort, as bleak as Dreiser's and as perversely comic as Chekhov's.

The playwrights of Ireland

Synge died in 1909 at the age of 38, but not before he had given the Abbey Theatre and the playwrights of Ireland a dramatic style, often vulgarized, alas, into peasantquality plays in which quaintness and condescending coyness displace Synge's unsparing realism. Synge invented a dialect in which the idioms and constructions of Irish are rendered directly into English. So exquisite a tool did this dialect become that Synge used it to splendid effect in his translations of Petrarch and Villon. But no other playwright could manage the trick.

Synge's example, and Yeats's solicitous encouragement, bore fruit in the work of the next great Abbey playwright, Sean O'Casey (1884-1964). Born in the Dublin slums, O'Casey, a Protestant, was the first figure of the Literary Renaissance to spring directly from the proletariat and to make the urban working class the subject of his attention. O'Casey needed no synthetic dialect; the speech of Dublin came naturally to him. His politics, however, came as a mild shock to his colleagues most especially Yeats, whom O'Casey remembered with wry affection in his memoirs for he professed to be a Communist.

Equally shocking to the public was his insistence on showing Dublin's raw backside. The presence of a prostitute in The Plough and the Stars together with the meeting of revolutionary patriots in the unholy precincts of a pub provoked riots at the play's premiere. Two years later, embittered at The Plough's reception and furious because Yeats refused to produce his next play, The Silver Tassie, O'Casey moved to England, never to return.

Nothing he wrote thereafter quite equalled his early works, which also included Juno and the Paycock and The Shadow of a Gunman.O'Casey's social passion, his sense of grievance, and his identification with his working class characters left him more vulnerable than Yeats and Synge to sentimentality; yet his affection for the outlaw and the outcast recalls the Fenian tradition and rescues his early plays from bathos. O'Casey's spiritual successor among Irish playwrights was Brendan Behan (1923-64).

Housepainter, drunkard, and selfmade intellectual, Behan, between 1956 and 1958, disposed of his mammoth talent in three works Borstal Boy, his memoir of life in a British reformatory where he was imprisoned for revolutionary terrorism on English soil;

The Quare Fellow, a drama of prison life under the pall of an inmate's imminent execution; and his magnum opus, The Hostage, after which he subsided into notoriety and drink. Behan's last words, spoken to the nun at his hospital bedside, were: God bless you, sister, an'd may all your sons be bishops, He lived and wrote with Rabelaisian gusto, In 1937, he joined the outlawed Irish Republican Army and gave his youth to the cause, although he grew to distrust the fanaticism he saw in it,

The Hostage is a kind of tragic farce in which an IRA contingent, commanded by a bizarre Ascendancy enthusiast, seizes a young British sol. dier and holds him hostage in a Dublin brothel on Nelson Street where the residents include, among the working girls, two outrageous homosexuals, a devout and lascivious spinster, and an innocent housemaid who falls in love with the hostage. The Republicans threaten to kill the prisoner in order to force the reprieve of two of their own facing execution in a Belfast jail.

Literature and the Arts in Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:11:00 +0000

In Ireland, the magic of language has from the earliest times conferred a special and exalted status on those who command it. The poets of ancient Ireland had a reputation for supernatural powers and may have belonged to a caste that practiced sorcery. Even in the modern era, men of letters have been accorded high political honours unheard of in other countries.

Douglas Hyde (1860-1949), one of those responsible for the revival of the Irish language and literature through the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893, became president of the Republic in 1938, and the poet and Nobel laureate W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) served as a senator from 1922 to 1928. In addition, the Irish language has imparted to the English speech of the country a haunting music and a distinctive, cantering rhythm.

Irish poets

The filidhe (masterpoets of the Celts) earned their prestige by subjecting themselves to a rigorous course of training at bardic academies where the curriculum demanded memorization of lengthy sagas and learning composition in complex meters.

Many graduates of the academies were attracted by monastic life, and their manuscripts and magnificent calligraphy and illumination made them Europe's pre-eminent students of literature. Between the 8th and 16th centuries these monks transcribed the oral traditions of which they were the living archives and, by keeping them in circulation, preserved them for posterity.

From various manuscript sources scholars can reconstruct the two great saga cycles, that of the Red Branch warriors of Ulster province and that of Finn MacCool and his Fenian band (the Fianna).

The Ulster cycle constitutes a portion of the tribal history of the Uliad, who gave their name to the northernmost of Ireland's four provinces, and seems to have become current during the 1st century BC, though a quantity of older lore had been incorporated in the cycle. The king of the Ulidians in the cycle is Concho bar (pronounced Con achoor), whose castle stood at Emain Macha near modern Keady, County Armagh. But the protagonist is Cu Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster, offspring of the sun god and hero of the tribe.

The cycle centers around the Tain Bo Cualinge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), an epic narrative in which the semi-legendary Queen Maeye of Connaught leads an expeditionary force toward Cooley (near Dundalk) to steal Conchobar's prized Brown Bull. Cu Chulainn single-handedly holds the invading army at bay while the Ulstermen recover from a 9-day illness.

Cu Chulainn adds to the conventional virtues of courage and honour an impulsive disdain for any check to his appetites. He is the arch individualist, a larger than life figure who postpones his first encounter with the Connaughtmen to keep a date with a woman, and who slays in single combat his best friend and his only son despite the promptings of human tenderness. His daring and determination together with a roguish impetuosity established a comic tradition in Irish literature. Cu Chulainn was specifically a hero of the men of Ulster.

But between the commencement of the O'Neill dynasty and the height of the Norse invasions, Irish society was challenged to transcend the old clan loyalties for the sake of military unity. This was achieved politically in the person of Bnan Boru and in literature through the Fenian cycle, which was the first truly national, rather than tribal, epic.

Finn MacCool, his son Ossian, his grandson Oscar, and his comrades Diarmaid and Cailte commanded the Fianna, the standing army of professional warriors said to have been mustered to the service of Cormac Mac Art, son of the founder of the Tara monarchy, in the 3rd century AD. The Fenians were from the outset, national rather than tribal heroes. Unlike the Ulster cycle, composed mostly in prose and incorporating myths in a highly learned manner, the Fenian cycle springs directly from popular folklore and employs a ballad meter to which the music of the common people was easily adapted. It is more immediate and dramatic.

The history of prose in Ireland

Its characteristic form is the monologue or dialogue and its setting is the Christian era into which some Fenian hero has survived to speak, often to St. Patrick, of bygone days of glory. Not originally a product of the bardic academies, the Fenian ycle. did not enter the courtly repertoire until the 12th century, by which time It had already displaced the Ulster sagas in popular favour.

In contrast to Cu Chulainn, champion of a clvlltzed nobility, the Fenians choose to live outside the pale of settlements and courts, preferring the woods and wilds. They are hunters rather than soldiers, akin to the gods of nature and place worshiped in the vernacular religion. It is from the Felllan traditIOn that Irish poetry receives its extraordinary sensitivity to nature: Arran of the many stags,The sea strikes against its shoulder , Skittish deer are on her peaks, Delicious berries on her manes roam a 15th-century manuscript, translated by Myles Dillon.

From the stories themselves flow the lyrical richness of Irish poetry, the sweetness and nostalgia of popular folk song, and the whole romantic spirit, dash, and panache of Irish history. The Fenian cycle inaugurates a dramatic and intensely personal literary style, which became the expressive mode ofhe Irish nation and provided the archetype of the outlaw brotherhood In which the 19th-century revolutionaries cast themselves.

Social upheaval and poetry in Ireland

The filidhe and its elite tradition were destroyed by the social upheavals caused by the Plantation policy, which replaced Irish landowners with English and later Scottish colonists prepared to offer allegiance to the crown. It was not until the 18th century, however, that It was finally extinguished.

As late as 1781, a young schoolteacher from Clondagach, County Clare, named Merriman, who had educated himself in the complexities of bardic composition, published an epic satire in the Irish language called The Midnight Court, in which the women of Ireland indict the men for contempt of matrimony and obtain a conviction in the court of the Fairy Queen. The poem is elegant, racy, and dreamlike, but its ribaldry proved too strong for a public taste narrowed by oppressive works that were pious and patriotic.

The poem was suppressed, though portions of it can be heard recited from memory in some modern Irish speaking households. Merriman, last of the filidhe, wrote nothing more and died in 1805.

Irish Literature in English

Literature in English has been written in Ireland since the 14th century, but many of the Anglo-Irish literati owe little to the national traditions. Irish was the native tongue, and the native populace, denied and excluded from educational institutions by the Penal Laws, produced a glorious but impermanent body of unwritten poetry. The chief educational institution in Ireland was Trinity College, Dublin, founded in 1592 as a university for the Protestant gentry. Trinity was the intellectual nursery of an extraordinary series of writers whose work places them more properly in a history of English rather than Irish literature.

Airport car hire in Dublin

If you are looking to tour the homes and cities of the famous Irish poets, you can pre-book airport car hire from Dublin and take your time to discover the homes and landscapes which inspired the great poets of Ireland.

Jonathan Swift and famous Irish authors

Yet their remarkable singularity of expression was one that could only have been nurtured in an environment where talk, conversation, and language provided the main indoor entertainment.
Chronologically, the first of these writers was Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), author of Gulliver's Travels, who is buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, of which he was dean. Next was William Congreve (1670-1729), author of one of the greatest comedies in the English language, The Way of the World. Then came Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74), the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, most famous for his play She Stoops to Conquer and for his friendship with Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Finally there was Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the flamboyant author of the play The Importance of Being Earnest and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.Two Dubliners who did not attend Trinity need to be mentioned: One is Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), the descendant of a famous Anglo-Irish family, whose masterpieces include The Rivals and The School for Scandal; the other is George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), widely considered to be the greatest dramatist in the English language after Shakespeare. Shaw spent his first 20 years living in seedy gentility in Dublin.

Even after he left to take up residence (and literary sovereignty) in London he never failed to involve himself in Irish affairs, whether they concerned Parnell's divorce or the Irish revolutionary Sir Roger David Casement's homosexuality. Indeed he is one of the few writers in history who is as famous for his political curmudgeonry as for his great works (St. Joan; Pygmalion; Heartbreak House). A statue of him by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy stands outside the National Gallery of Ireland, to which he left a substantial part of his fortune.

Thomas Moore

Occasionally the Protestant Ascendancy did produce a writer who was truly Irish in sympathy. One of these was Thomas Moore (1779-1852). Moore was a friend and the eulogizer of Robert Emmet (executed in 1803), the prototype of the Irishman who is both Protestant and nationalist. Emmet himself deserves a place in Irish literature for his speech from the dock which contains the immortal words Let no man write my epitaph.

Moore was a literary, though not a militant, patriot who wrote in the plaintive style of Irish folk song, often to popular airs. Songs like The Minstrel Boy and The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls were ambassadors from romantic Ireland to the English gentry and helped revise their image of the Irish as crude and barbarous.

In 1842, The Nation magazine began publishing the poems and translations of James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. Their work, infused with the energy and misty grandeur of the Irish language, excited interest in ancient literature, particularly the Fenian cycle. Its vibrant tapestry of hunts and fatal love, journeys to the underworld, battles between mortals and ghosts, sojourns in fairyland, and tone of wistful longing for the lost ardour of youth appealed to the romantic temperament of the times.

Sinn Fein and the Orangemen of Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:08:00 +0000

In 1888, a divorce proceeding revealed Charles Parnell´s liaison with a colleague's wife; he was condemned by Protestant England and Catholic Ireland, his followers dropped away, and he died in disgrace 3 years later at the age of 45. Nationalist leadership passed to the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone), a party founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, who favoured an independent Irish Parliament.

Despite the resistance of Ulster's Orangemen, a society formed to protect the privileges and liberties of Protestants, and the organization of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers, a Home Rule Bill was finally enacted in 1914. But the Orange militants had succeeded in amending the bill to give Ulster's six counties, with their Protestant majority, the option of seceding from Ireland and remaining in the Union. The outbreak of World War I fatally delayed implementation of the bill, and Ireland, on the eve of its independence, stood divided against itself.

Ireland and the Easter uprising

The Easter Rebels of 1916, also known as the Irish Volunteers, looked to England's enemy, the Germans, for aid as Hugh O'Neill had looked to the Spanish and Wolfe Tone to the French. On Good Friday, 1916, their emissary to Berlin, Roger Casement, was captured by the British while returning to warn that German support would not be forthcoming. (Casement was convicted before a military court and hanged.) The Volunteers canceled what was to have been a national insurgence, but the Dublin contingent, hopeless of success, rose to martyrdom on Easter Monday.

The 1,200 Volunteers seized strategic buildings around the city; on the steps of the General Post Office, leader Patrick Pearse read the proclamation of an Irish Republic. British troops, ordered to dislodge the rebels, left central Dublin in ruins. Seventeen rebel leaders including Pearse, Thomas McDonough, John McBride, Joseph Plunkett, and James Connolly died before a firing squad. Public outrage at the executions persuaded the British to commute the sentences of William Cosgrave, later president of the Free State, and Eamon de Valera, later president of the provisional government of the Republic.

Irish martyrs and Sinn Fein victory

The martyrs, none of them important figures before death, became national heroes afterward. In the elections of 1919, Sinn Fein scored a landslide victory in parliamentary elections, but the deputies refused to take their seats, convening instead the Dail Eireann (Assembly of Ireland) under de Valera's presidency and proclaiming the Republic once again. England implemented Home Rule, exempting from it the six counties of Ulster, but the Dail would accept nothing short of total independence.

The IRA and Michael Collins

Ireland burst into violence: The Irish Republican Army (IRA) under Sinn Fein leader Michael Collins waged a bloody guerilla war with the Black and Tans, England's paramilitary police force to whom countless atrocities were attributed; British police fired on the crowds at a sporting event in Dublin's Croke Park; army barracks came under regular attack. The ordinary functions of government dissolved in subversion. In 1921 Collins negotiated a treaty with Britain by which a new state was created as a dominion in the commonwealth and under the crown.

Griffith became the Free State's first president, and Collins, fearing a civil war, made overtures to de Valera assuring him privately there would be no oath of allegiance to the crown in an Irish constitution. But de Valera remained adamant and organized an underground Republic with himself as president, Sinn Fein as its party and the IRA as its militia; it would acknowledge neither the crown nor the; partition of Ireland.

In 1922 encouraged by a Free State constitution that embodied the terms of the treaty IRA troops occupied the Four Courts, the building in Dublin that house the superior courts of lreland. Under enormous pressure from Britain, the Free State sent troops and gunboats and a few days later commenced a series of raids on Republican headquarters in Dublin hotels. Republicans and Free State were at war.

Political unity in Ireland

Political unity once again escaped the Irish, and the country quaked with assassinations and skirmishes. Griffith died in August and Collins a few days later in an ambush near Cork. In 1923, de Valera declared a ceasefire. He agreed to enter the Dail in 1927, whereupon Sinn Fein drew from him to the leftist frontier of Republican intransigence, De Valera formed a new party, Fianna Fail, whose members he urged to take the oath of alliance to the crown as he had done with some reservations.

Fiann Fail Ireland

Fiann Fail acquired a majority in 1932 and a new government, headed by de valera, was formed. A new constitution was promulgated in 1937, declarinng the nation the Republic of Eire and abolishing the oath of allegiance to the crown. In 1949, Eire withdrew from the commonwealth; at the same time Britain, to establish a legal basis for partition, referred the question to the heavily Protestant Ulster Parliament seated at Stormont, which put the issue of union before a popular referendum whose outcome was never in doubt. Since the late 1920s, the industrialized cities of Northern Ireland Belfast and Derry - and many of the larger towns have been divided into sectarian camps.

Catholic Civil Rights Movement Ireland

In the 1960s, a Catholic civil rights movement agitated for Catholic representation at Stormont in proportion to the Catholic population, which brought a violent response from the Protestants, to whom the cause seemed synonymous with reunification with the Republic.

The IRA, now an extra legal militia out-led even the Republic, and came to the defence of the Catholic constituency. Confronted by vIrtual civil war, whIch Stormont was powerless to stop since it represented only one side, Britain suspended the Northern Ireland legislature in 1972. Stepping between the warring factions, the British army became a target of IRA hostility along with the paramilitary Ulster Defence Force. But now, bound by the legal precedent of the 1949 referendum, Britain has no way of withdrawing from Ulster without a majority mandate, and Ulster had no way of forming a government to which both sides could consent and thereby impose law and order without British intervention.

Airport car hire in Ireland

Since the troubles subsided in Ireland, visitors have increased, and the easiest and most economical way to explore Ireland is to pre-book a hire a car from the airport at Dublin, Belfast or Knock.

Ulster Protestants and Ireland

Ulster Protestants are proud of their heritage and fearful of losing not only property but some of their rights and liberties as British subjects under the Irish Republican constitution, which embodies the moral doctrines of the Catholic church. Efforts within the Republic to conciliate Northern Ireland by expunging from the constitution certain clauses such as the one against divorce offensive to Protestants have proven futile. Further, the Republic's economy is weak and agricultural, plagued by unemployment and inadequate social services, while Northern Ireland is industrial and shares the benefits of the British welfare system.

The Republicans, however, have never acknowledged Britain's authority over any portion of Ireland, and regard partition as an act of gerrymandering by an illegitimate power. The intransigence of both sides makes reconciliation seem unlikely, despite recent agreements and attempts at rapprochement between the British and Irish prime ministers.

Cromwell and Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:04:00 +0000

After Owen Roe's victory over parliamentary forces at Benburb in 1646, Charles I, facing Cromwell's insurgence at home, offered a treaty that would have reversed the Plantation policy; but the Catholic clergy, holding out for emancipation from the Protestant crown, persuaded Owen Roe to reject it. After deposing the king in 1649, Cromwell turned to the reconquest of Ireland, and in September stormed the town of Drogheda, slaughtering 3,500 inhabitants in reprisal for earlier revolutionary terrorism.

Owen Roe's death in November signaled the collapse of the resistance. Limerick and Galway capitulated in 1652, and 30,000 Irish soldiers followed their chiefs into exile in what the Irish remember as the Flight of the Wild Geese.

The Cromwellian Act of Settlement in 1652 extended the Plantation policy; Irish lands were seized and distributed among demobilized English soldiers and the financiers of the reconquest. The Catholic church was outlawed and its properties confiscated. Towns were seeded with English burgesses, and native merchants were relocated to the perimeters.

The common people were reduced to virtual slavery as tenants on lands immemorially theirs. By 1655, what remained of the Gaelic nation languished among the stony acres west of the Shannon. By 1688, Protestants, though they constituted a tiny minority of its population, owned 78 percent of all the land in Ireland.

James II in Ireland

With the ascension of James II, a Catholic, in 1685, England's policies in Ireland were somewhat liberalized. But James was deposed in 1688 and fled to France. In 1689 he moved to Ireland, where he hoped to establish in this Catholic nation a base from which to recover his throne. Catholic France rallied to the Jacobites (as his followers were called) and sent a fleet to Kinsale in 1689.

The Battle of the Boyne Ireland

But Protestant Europe as determinedly supported William of Orange, James's Protestant successor. Things came to a head in July, 1690, when a mixed army of Danes, Germans, French Huguenots, and English overwhelmed the Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne. The Irish army, under Patrick Sarsfield, fell back and retrenched beyond the Shannon.

They then sallied forth to meet the Protestants at the Battle of Aughrim, and, when defeated again, Sarsfield gathered the remains of his army behind the walls of Limerick and indomitably withstood two lengthy English sieges before finally obtaining favourable terms of surrender, which London was largely to ignore. Sarsfield and his men, like the earls some 40 years before them, fled in exile to France. (Sarsfield joined the French army and died in battle in 1693, crying: Oh, that this were for Ireland.)

English rule in Ireland

The hope of lrish freedom dashed, England imposed the Penal Laws in 1695, the apartheid statutes by which Catholics were denied nearly all rights at law and were reduced to serfdom. (In the words of one lord chancellor: The law does not take into account the existence of such a person as an Irish Roman Catholic.) Yet while the Penal Laws ensured the privileges of the Ascendancy (Protestant settlers), they also effectively tied most of the Protestant gentry but not the Protestant magnates to the land, while tariffs restricted the economy.

Furthermore, although the Dublin Parliament was supposedly autonomous in most areas, in fact it merely rubberstamped the acts of Westminster. All Catholics and many Protestants chafed under the English yoke.

In 1791 the Protestant patriot Wolfe Tone founded the United Irishmen, which inspired by the French Revolution attempted to bring together Catholics and Protestants in common cause against the English government.

The movement gained strength quickly in Ireland but was suppressed in 1794. Tone fled to Paris to raise an army of liberation, and, in 1798, Ireland's third revolution broke out in Wexford. Tone and a French fleet hurried to its aid, but the ragtag rebels, led by two priests, John Murphy and Michael Murphy, were crushed at Vinegar Hill in Enniscorty (County Wexford) before the fleet could arrive.

The Act of Union Ireland

The French, surrounded at Castlebar (County Mayo), surrendered, and Tone, denied an honorable execution before a firing squad and condemned instead to the gallows, slit his throat. In 1801, the Act of Union abolished the Irish Parliament and absorbed Ireland into a United Kingdom. Revolution erupted for the fourth time in 1803, led this time by Robert Emmet, but it collapsed in confusion on the brink of success, and Emmet, whose stirring speech from the dock embedded itself in the Irish memory, was hanged.

The Catholic Relief Bill Ireland

In 1793, a Catholic Relief Bill had ostensibly restored all Catholic rights except that of holding elective office, an omission that rendered the rest meaningless. In 1823, Daniel O'Connell the brilliant Kerry lawyer and orator who came to be known as the Liberator organized the Catholic Association which, by tithing its members a penny a month, became an organ of legal defence and agitation and the underground government of the Gaelic nation.

O'Connell was a peerless organizer, and when defiant voters in Clare elected him to Westminster in 1828, the orchestrated mass movement behind him so intimidated England that he was seated, accomplishing full Catholic emancipation in a stroke.

In 1830, leading a substantial Irish voting bloc in Parliament, O'Connell embarked on a campaign to repeal the Act of Union. Committed to reform within the constitution, activism within the law, and loyalty to the crown, O'Connell threw his party's support behind the Whigs, counting on them to back the repeal movement if they displaced the Tories. But Prime Minister Melbourne's Whig government, once elected, reneged, supported by a Protestant Ascendancy determined to protect its property and power under the Union by force if necessary.

Daniel O Connell and revolution in Ireland

The Irish masses stood ready to take up arms at the first word from O'Connell; the Young Ireland party, led by journalist Charles Gavin Duffy and poet Thomas Davis, urged O'Connell to abandon his pacifist principles and lead them in revolution. O'Connell had no such intention. Instead, in 1842-43, he organized and addressed a series of monster meetings rallies in support of repeal; at the one held at Tara, nearly a million people assembled peacefully to hear him speak in the open air.

Many of the original battle meeting sites can still be seen in Ireland, and modern day visitors can take advantage of cheap airport car hire from Dublin Airport to explore the historical sites of Ireland.The meetings were perfectly legal, but the English government mindful of O'Connell's tremendous influence sent troops to surround the meeting held at Clontarf and threatened violence if the crowd did not disperse.

Though he was within his rights and though the assembly could probably have overwhelmed the soldiers, O'Connell cancelled the meeting. The next year, he and Duffy were arrested and convicted of sedition. Though the House of Lords later reversed the verdict, O'Connell emerged from 2 months in prison largely stripped of his influence. He split with Young Ireland in 1846; momentum passed to its leaders, and he died in 1847.

The Potato Famine Ireland

In 1847, the potato, staple of the common people, succumbed to blight for the second time and the Great Famine descended over Ireland. It was a catastrophe beyond description; starvation, dysentery, and cholera decimated the population, and tens of thousands fled to America. Ireland lost about 2 million people between 1845 and 1855, yet Britain stuck to its freetrade philosophy and intervened as little as possible on the theory that private enterprise would eventually sort things out. Relief aid actually decreased as the famine worsened.

Yet, throughout this Irish holocaust, food was exported from Ireland to pay rents to absentee landlords in England. Great estates went bankrupt and passed into the hands of profiteers who thought nothing of evicting their destitute and starving tenants.

In 1848, under the leadership of William Smith O'Brien and spurred by the writings of John Mitchel (who had been deported to Australia for publishing the seditious journal United Irishman), what remained of Young Ireland staged and bungled an armed insurrection. Its participants followed Mitchel to Australia.

For almost a decade, the nationalist movement lay dormant and the Irish language and economy languished through neglect. Industrialization was financed by London only in Ulster, which attached itself commercially to the industrial northwest of England, alienating itself still further from the rest of Ireland, where there were virtually no manufacturers. Circumstances were preparing Ulster for separation.

Home Rule in Ireland

After the collapse of the repeal movement, the nationalists regrouped behind the Home Rule proposal, which would have restored at least a measure of autonomy to the Irish nation. After 1875, the leader of the Home Rule party at Westminster was Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish Protestant and charismatic leader who implemented the policy of obstruction, or withholding his considerable political support to gain concessions for Ireland.

Parnell's tactical brilliance secured the admiration and cooperation of William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister; despite their efforts, however, the Home Rule Bill was twice defeated in Parliament. Shortly thereafter, Parnell suffered a serious blow to his reputation: Two British civil servants were murdered in Dublin's Phoenix Park, and The Times published a forged letter allegedly from Parnell condoning the killings.

The history of Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Imagine that you are standing on a windswept headland, a country of lush green glens behind you, the tumultuous sea at your feet. A beautiful girl approaches you, an orphan, she says, but of noble lineage, who tells you a tale so full of romance and heroism and piety and cruelty that you cannot decide whether to laugh or cry, but still find yourself listening enraptured to her compelling voice.

This is Ireland, and the Irish themselves are inclined to surrender to her charms. For centuries, they have been compounding a political and social mythology out of songs, legends, and history, and the heroes of that mythology Finn MacCool, Brian Boru, Patrick Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, Daniel O'Connell, and Charles Parnell remain the controlling models for modern Ireland's political and social behavior.

When Patrick Pearse, a leader of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, invoked the Ulster hero Cu Chulainn while British troops besieged his little band in the Dublin General Post Office, he rallied his men with an image from the nation's antiquity. The revival of the Irish language, a cornerstone of government policy, affirms the continuity of the Irish Republic with its remotest antecedents. It is a nation that requires an understanding of its most distant past to complete an understanding of its present.

The Celts were a family of Indo-European warrior aristocracies related by language, religion, mastery of horsemanship, and a flammable temperament that kept them always at each other's throats. From their arrival in Ireland between 500 and 50 BC, the Celtic clans warred ceaselessly among themselves for territory, tribute, and cattle.

Sensitive and superstitious, they were terrorized by their priests (druids) and masterpoets, whose curses carried weight with the gods and in whose memories reposed the only record of tribal histories, genealogies, and myth. These learned, almost Brahmanic castes maintained their own training academies and provided the only source of social unity among the various tribes.

The Celts of Ireland

The family was the fundamental Celtic social unit from which all rights and authority flowed. Tribal alliances were matters of military convenience rather than treaty, and not until the 5th century AD did the Irish establish the semblance of a central power. Even then, the high king, ruling from the Hill of Tara, drew his authority not from law but from the tacit consensus of the legislative assemblies of tribal chieftains and nobles.

The O'Neill high kings, whose dynasty endured until the 11th century, invoked a national spirit by convening the first such assembly though each tribe had previously conducted its own and continued to do so. The O'Neills also raised a standing army (the Fianna), but even after they had subdued the Ulaid of Ulster last of the Celtic tribes to resist Gaelic dominance in 851, their control of Ireland remained tenuous.

The Roman Empire and Ireland

Gaelic civilization flourished unconsumed by the Roman Empire in what W. B. Yeats would call the Celtic Twilight. Its decentralized social structure evolved without interference, and when, in the 5th century, Christianity was introduced by St. Patrick, the new church adapted itself at once to this structure.

Abbeys and monasteries patronized by local chieftains and entirely independent of diocesan authority became the seats of church power; out of touch with Rome, the Irish clung to old doctrines long after they had been abandoned or revised elsewhere in Christendom. Yet the monasteries nourished a lively intellectual life; graduates of the poetic academies, attracted by the ascetic ethos, flocked to the monasteries and abbeys, learned to write, and created the stunningly illuminated manuscripts in which the oral literature of the nation was first recorded. By decree of St.Columba (Columcille), a Gaelic prince, poet, and founder of the first native order, lay poets were officially employed in every royal court after 575. The literary arts thus enjoyed the patronage of both church and state.

When the barbarians inundated Europe in the 5th century, Christian learning crawled to high ground in Ireland. As the deluge subsided, Irish missionaries ventured over the European continent, founding monasteries, restoring literacy, and resuscitating the faith amid the ruins of Hellenic civilization.

John Scotus Erigena (which means Irishborn) and his contemporary Sedulius Scotus taught in the palace schools founded by Charlemagne, and the monasteries ofIreland received students from abroad; but while this lively traffic earned Ireland the epithet Isle of Saints and Scholars, it turned Rome's efforts to reforming the doctrinally wayward church and bringing it under central control.

The Vikings in Ireland

In 795, Ostmen, the predatory Vikings, commenced their raids along the Irish coast, leveling monasteries and torching whole libraries. These Norse pirates built a string of garrisons along the eastern coast, proclaiming themselves kings and establishing Ireland's first cities and ports. The fractious' Gaels were helpless to dislodge these ferocious and well-organized intruders. Late in the 10th century, Brian Boni, an obscure chieftain from Clare, overthrew the Danish King of Limerick and, by three usurpations, dispossessed the O'Neills and declared himself High King of Ireland.

For a few short years, Brian united the tribes of Ireland behind his leadership; he routed the Danes from their chief stronghold, Dublin, at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. Brian, alas, lost his life in the battle, and the Irish relapsed into squabbling over succession to the Tara monarchy.

Though their dominance had been broken, the Norsemen remained in Ireland as sailors and merchants, intermarrying with the Gaels and assimilating the native culture. In 1166 they joined with the chiefs of Leinster to overthrow their king, Dermot MacMurrough, who fled to England where he formed an alliance with some Norman adventurers who he hoped would restore him to his realm.

In 1169, these mailclad buccaneers landed on the Baginburn headland in Waterford and in 2 years had seized Leinster for their leader, Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, known as Strongbow. MacMurrough died soon after. Before these brilliant, methodical soldiers the Irish had no defense. In 1171, Strongbow and the rest of the Normans resentfully acknowledged themselves subjects of Henry II, and the High King Rory O'Connor recognized Henry as his sovereign in return for control over all unconquered areas. Ireland had become the property of the English crown.

The Normans marked their holdings with a line called the Pale, a thin stnp of land on the eastern coast. But as Norman and Gael intermarried, the former became, as the saying goes, more Irish than the Irish themselves.(The Irish referred to the Normans as old foreigners, while the English called those who had gone native degenerate English.) By 1261, the Gaels had adopted Norman military techniques, putting an end to their conquests, while the Normans had taken up the Gaelic language and culture, mamtaming poets and commissioning manuscripts like native chieftains.

The rapprochement displeased the English. In 1297, to consolidate the colony and muster troops from it for his Scottish wars, Edward I convened an Irish Parliament at Kilkenny, which was hostile to the Gaels and assimilated Normans. By 1366, the Parliament had promulgated statutes to separate the races, but these were largely ignored by a very mixed populatio.

The Normans had built cities, introduced English common law, and introduced names like Bourke, Butler, and Carey with O'Brien, O'Neill, and O'Donnell. Culturally distinct from England and uncomfortable as colonials, the Normans declared parliamentary independence in 1460.

Henry XIII and Ireland

The Reformation and the Tudor monarchy put an end to the Norman's adventure. In 1541, Henry VIII compelled the Irish Parliament to recall his sovereignty. He then asserted his authority to govern the Irish church, as he had already done in England, and Imposed the Plantation policy, under which native Irish and some degenerate English landholdings were seized and re-granted to loyal English fortune seekers.

Resistance to the policy centered in Ulster where the chieftains Red Hugh O'Donnell and Hugh O'Neill, setting aside old rivalries, formed the Tyrone Confederation and, in the first of Ireland's revolutions, rose against Henry's new earls (as those who literally bought titles and rights to the land were called).

Promises of Spanish assistance were obtained, and from 1594 to 1603 the Tyrone Confederation rebelled with some success against the English. In 1601, a Spanish fleet sailed into Kinsale on the southern coast, and the English Lord Mountjoy turned to attack them, whereupon O'Donnell and O'Neill swept down from the north to besiege the besiegers.

The Battle of Kinsale Ireland

The Spanish pressed for a decisive engagement; O'Neill argued for attrition, but O'Donnell forced the issue. The Batle of Kinsale was fought on Christmas Eve, 1601, and the Hispano-Gaelic alliance, insufficiently prepared, went down in defeat. The defeated earls, O'Donnell and O'Neill, were permitted to return to Ulster; but after a few years of suffering English rule, they sailed in self-imposed exile to the Continent in 1607, an event often called the Flight of the Earls.

The Plantation policy went forward apace. In Ulster, barely one-tenth of the land was retained by its native inhabitants; the rest was planted with Presbyterian colonists from Scotland, dissenters in their own country. In 1641, Norman soldiers, unemployed and wandering the countryside, enlisted with the Irish chiefs of Ulster in another uprising.

The Irish Parliament, now sitting at Dublin, expelled its Catholic members, who gathered at Kilkenny to proclaim a provisional government. Presiding over this revolution was Owen Roe O'Neill, nephew of Hugh and a statesman of some sophistication; he envisioned for Ireland a centralized and autonomous native government.

Things to do in Ireland

Whether you want to make the most of the countryside, or enjoy the vibrant cities of Dublin and Belfast, there is plenty to do and see in Ireland. Car hire in Irish airports can be pre-booked before you travel and picked up when you arrive, so you can make the most of the sights and sounds of this diverse land at your own pace.

Wexford Town Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:05:00 +0000

The main attraction in Wexford Town is the people, whose Irishness is not of the mild, gentle folk strain. Instead, they are keen of mind and quick in discussion, and they often like their wit a bit on the saucy side. Spend a pleasant day browsing among the narrow streets of this hilly town, then head for the nearest bar stool (an easy assignment, as one local claims there are more than 50 pubs in Wexford).

A friendly comment or two from a visitor is likely to get a native monologue going, be it a recitation of the local history or a soliloquy on the praiseworthy local weather. An Irish American can expect a lively debate on the political fortunes of the Kennedy family, whose ancestors came from nearby Dunganstown in County Wexford. The hardy ladies of the country market are easy to engage in conversation as well.

They will tell a visitor that from medieval times the market has been the heartbeat of the town and that in the days of the schooners, the ships could dock quite close to unload their goods for sa]e. They'll also recall that long before the young people started their natural foods campaign, the wives of Wexford farmers knew the benefits of vegetables grown in chemical free soil, and they never forsook their homemade breads and jams for commercial substitutes.

This boldness of spirit is not all talk. It has produced such illustrious native sons as John Barry, regarded as the founder of the US Navy, born 10 miles from Wexford at Bally sampson, and Sir Robert J. McClure, discoverer of the Northwest Passage.

The boldest and proudest Wexford men of days gone by,' however, were those who took part in the Rebellion of 1798. In that year, the United Irishmen were unsuccessful in planning a general uprising against the British, so Father John Murphy, a County Wexford priest, independently led his parishioners, armed with pitchforks, or pikes, in revolt.

The rebellion lasted a month before it was suppressed, but it has remained alive in folk memory through Irish ballads such as The Wearing ofthe Green and The Boys of Wexford.

Located where the river Slaney flows into the shallow Wexford Harbor, the town is old and has an impossibly narrow main street, a legacy of its Viking past. It is said that a settlement existed here as early as AD 150, but it was the Vikings who developed it, calling it Waesjord, meaning harbor of mud flats. Initially, the Vikings used this as a base from which to plunder the countryside and later turned it into a major trading post.

The history of Wexford

The Anglo-Norman invasion led by Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, known as Strongbow, ousted the Vikings in 1169 and launched a new era of domination. The face of the town also changed. Selskar Abbey rose at its northwestern edge tradition holds that Henry II came here in 1172 to do Lenten penance for the murder of Thomas a Becket, and it was here that Strongbow's daughter was married and Wexford soon became a walled town, with five fortified gateways and four castles.

The only remains of these defenses are the West Gate, built in the 14th century and used until the end of the 16th century, and a portion of wall nearby.Norman nobles used one of the town's squares for the bloody sport of bull baiting and to this day the square is called the Bull Ring. The name stuck, despite the fact, that the worst of a much bloodier slaughter, the massacre of Wexford's citizenry by Oliver Cromwell in 1649, occurred in the same place.

The townspeople erected no monument to remind them of this deed, but in 1905, when they got around to commemorating the insurgency of 1798, they placed their statue of an Irish pikeman here, in a stroke of independent mindedness. More of the same spirit lies behind the confusion of Wexford's street names. Many have two names, one dating from the days of British rule, the other from the founding of the Irish Republic in 1922, the latter likely to be the name of a rebel.

The establishment of an industrial estate with German and American firms has brought needed jobs into the area. Lett & Company, .which transplants small seed mussels into Wexford Harbor from less nourishing areas, is located in Wexford Town and is the biggest single employer in the Irish fishing industry.

Things to see and do in Wexford Ireland and car hire

There is so much to see and do in Wexford that the best way to discover the area is by hire car from Dublin or Knock Airport. Car hire can be pre-booked before you travel, which will save you time and money when you arrive.Then there's the tourist industry, which Wexford comes by almost effortlessly, given its location in the sunniest part of Ireland, near the 6-mile beach of Rosslare, which draws Irish holidaymakers unsolicited as honeybees to clover.

Tourism is not entirely effortless, however, because the energy that goes into the yearly Wexford Opera Festival and all its accompanying fringe events cannot be discounted. At opera time, later in the fall, nearly every family in town has at least one member backstage sewing costumes or painting props, or elsewhere hanging pictures for an exhibition or setting up chairs for a lecture.

That the festival exists at all is the result of another stroke of boldness on the part of Wexford's people. In 1951, a group of residents tired of listening to phonograph records and resolved to hear the real thing, even if they had to produce it themselves.

The orchestra was hired, singers were engaged, other professionals were called in, and what eventually was to become an acclaimed event on the international opera calendar was off to a brave beginning.

The town's memorials, churches, and abbey are all within a 5-minute walk of Main Street. John Barry Memorial In 1956, the US presented Ireland with this handsome statue of the founder of the US Navy, who was born in County Wexford in 1745. Commodore Barry stands on Crescent Quay where two former American presidents, Dwight D.

Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, laid wreaths on separate occasions. The inscriptions on the monument list a few of Barry's accomplishments during the American Revolution. Walk up the street behind the monument for a lifelike view of the commodore looking out to sea with his mighty cape blowing in the wind.

Maritime Museum Wexford - A retired lighthouse ship, the Guillemot moored about 15 miles southwest of town at Kilmore Quay is home to a museum devoted to Wexford's seafaring days. When the ship's flag is flying, the museum is open.Kilmore Quay Bull Ring Wexford - The medieval practice of bullbaiting killing bulls for sportonce took place in this small, historic square. This is also the place where on October 1, 1649, Oliver Cromwell had 2,000 Irish men, women, and children slaughtered.

A statue to a pikeman, done by Oliver Sheppard and erected in 1905, now dominates the square in tribute to the peasants who took part in what came to be known as the Rebellion of 1798. Oscar Wilde's mother lived in the house that is now Diana Donnelly's boutique (legend says that Wilde's mother was born in room No. 10 of the Old Wexford Coaching Inn).
At the east side of the ring a market is held on Fridays. Here Wexford women sell their vegetables; baked goods, jams, jellies, honey, and sometimes crafts in buildings dating from 1871.

St. Iberius Church Wexford - This Georgian masterpiece (Church of Ireland) was built in 1760 on land occupied by other houses of worship dating from earliest Norse days. The handsome interior and superb acoustics make it a favorite concert hall during the Wexford Opera Festival.
Wexford Arts Centre - Once the Market House, then Town Hall, this building was restored as a cultural headquarters and special events site. Its now elegant second story boasts five Waterford crystal chandeliers. Around the corner from the Bull Ring, Corn Market.

Twin Churches Wexford -The Roman Catholic churches of the Immaculate Conception on Rowe Street and of the Assumption on Bride Street, both designed by Robert Pierce, were inaugurated on the same day in 1858 when Wexford's original nine parishes became two, thanks to the unflagging efforts of Father James Roche, who is buried in the Bride Street church.
Selskar Abbey Wexford - It is a pity the town has not done more in restoring and promoting this 12th-century site. The abbey was once quite extensive, although all that can be seen today are a 14thcentury battlement tower and church.

A long, covered passage runs underground to the far side of town. Tradition says that Henry II did penance here for murdering Thomas 11 Becket, but historians now think St. Mary's, protected within the town walls, a more likely site for his acts of contrition. Some of the older people in town can remember when the church was still in use.

To explore the ruins, visitors must obtain a key from a nearby house (a notice on the gate explains where). Behind the abbey remains the old West Gate, the only one of Wexford's five original gateways still standing, and part of the town walls. Entrance at the intersection of Temperance Row, West Gate, and Slaney St.

Franciscan Friary Wexford - Built in the 17th century on the site of an earlier church destroyed during Cromwellian times, this was the parish church for Wexford Town until the twin churches of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception were completed in 1858.

The Franciscan friary was extensively redecorated in the 19th century, when the vaulted ceiling, marble columns, and organ were added. School St. Irish National Heritage Park Located about 2 miles north of Wexford Town on the banks of the river Slaney, this new outdoor museum reflects centuries of Ireland's history. Each exhibit is set in an appropriate environment on the banks of a river estuary, in a woodland, in a marshland, or on a mountain slope.

Displays include a crannog (an early lake dwelling), ring forts, souterrains (underground escape passages), round towers, dolmens, honzontal mills, and afulachtfiagh (an ancient cooking place that used hot stones to heat food).Johnstown Castle Wexford - This 19th-century turreted Gothic mansion incorporates an ear her castle and IS the former home of the Esmonde Grogan, and Fitzgerald families.

It IS now owned by the State Agricultural College, but visitors can tour the beautiful gardens, lakes, and nature trails that surround it. Exhibits in the Irish Agricultural Museum in the castle's restored farm buildings include harness ware and antique farm machinery as well as a reconstructed farm kitchen and bedroom and a creamery. Off the Rosslare Harbour road, 22 miles south of Wexford.

Wexford places to visit

An excellent choice for a day spent outdoors is the Saltee Islands, Ireland's largest and most amou bird sanctuary. During spring and early summer, the Great Saltee (which is 1 mile long) and the Little Saltee are home to more than 3 illion gulls, puffins, and other feathered creatures that delight bird watchers. The Islands are a 45minute boat trip off the coast of Kilmore Quay, about 20 miles southwest of Wexford.

Kilmore Quay Wexford itself is a quaint fishing village of thatch roofed cottages. The lovely, modern Saltees hotel contains rooms named after different species of birds found on the Islands.

Car hire in Wexford

Wexford car hire can be booked from Dublin Airport before you travel and you can pre-book car hire at every major airport in Ireland to save time and money when you arrive.

Waterford City Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:02:00 +0000

Waterford is a gentle city of Georgian doorways and back streets with names like Lady Lane. It stretches for a it more than half a mile along the southern bank of the river Suir, well up a long inlet from the sea, and during the 17th century its harbor was one of the busiest in the country. Meat, fish, and corn were exported to the Continent, and wine came back. Ships bound for America were provisioned here. Today, one of the principal exports from its stillbusy quays is beef, though Waterford crystal is its most famous export.

The history of Waterford City Ireland

The old Waterford Glass Factory was founded in 1783, at a time when the city originally a Viking settlement was undergoing a burst of development and beginning to outgrow its medieval dimensions. Graceful Georgian homes belonging to the merchant class began to appear along the Mall, and John Roberts, an architect responsible for many of the city's elegant structures, was at work designing the public buildings and churches that are among the city's most prominent landmarks City Hall and the Catholic and Protestant cathedrals are all his.

The latter, which was erected between 1773 and 1779 on the site of a much earlier church, is a stately testimony to Waterford's rich Protestant families, some of whom were carried up the slight incline into Cathedral Square in sedan chairs.

Waterford's most famous landmark, however, is a remnant of Viking times. Sitric the Dane is credited with fortifying the site of the city in the ninth century, and Reginald the Dane, a descendant of Sitric, is believed to have strengthened the fortifications in 1003 by erecting what has since become known as Reginald's Tower.

Along with the city walls and two other towers, Reginald's Tower protected the city from invasion first by the Celts and later, when the Norsemen and Celts put aside their differences to join forces against a common enemy, from invasion by the Normans. You can still see part of the old city wall inside the Reginald Lounge, adjacent to the tower.

The Normans finally did take Waterford in 1170, in the person of Richard de Clare, an emissary of Henry II of England. De Clare was better known as Strongbow, for the sureness of his weapons and tactics, and his victory over the city's defenders was both an easy and a far reaching one.

The capture of Waterford was the beginning of the AngloNorman domination of Ireland. Strongbow's marriage shortly thereafter to Eva, the daughter of Dermot MacMurrough, the Irish King of Leinster, consolidated the position of the Conquering Normans. This fateful event, too, took place in Waterford, reputedly in Reginald's Tower (though the original Viking cathedral, predecessor of Christ Church Cathedral, may have been the actual site).

King John granted the city its first charter in 1205 (his sword and several of the city's subsequent charters are in the Reginald's Tower museum), and in several centuries to come Waterford would be intensely loyal to the English Crown.

Henry VII gave it its motto, Unconquered City, in the 15th century, in gratitude for its successful efforts in fighting off attacks by two pretenders to his throne. But loyalty to the English king in temporal matters did not extend to recognition of the Crown's supremacy in religious matters.

The city remained Catholic in the 16th century, and because of this, its charter was eventually withdrawn and its Catholic citizens suffered much in the Cromwellian sieges of the mid 17th century. Their churches were closed and confiscated and many Catholics were sent as slaves to the West Indies.

Several abbeys flourished ih Waterford. The ruins of the once extensive 13th century Dominican friary can be seen. Another large abbey, the Holy Ghost Friary of the Franciscans, or, as it is known locally, the French Church, was built a little later in the same century and is also now in ruins. Both were suppressed by Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Franciscan friary to become a hospital and then a home to a colony of French Huguenot refugees.

Most visitors come to Waterford to tour the glass factory and concentrate on the gift shops around the quays. But there are revealing detours from the beaten path, such as a walk out to Ballybricken Green, one of the oldest sections. When the Normans controlled Waterford proper, this is where the Irish lived, outside the Patrick Street gate of the city walls.

And the side streets and back lanes of this city of 50,000 people are worth discovering for their quaint houses, historic churches, and unexpected finds such as the ancient carvings on the friary wall in Lady Lane. Not much of the great abbeys may remain, but in these narrow passageways, Waterford's medieval atmosphere seems trapped forever like snow in a glass paperweight.

Waterford Glass Factory Ireland

Waterford Glass Factory It is said that thousands of people a week visit the Waterford Glass Factory to watch Ireland's most famous crystal being mixed, blown, and cut by hand from the raw ingredients of silica sand, potash, and red lead. Not only are the guided tours free, they are also interesting and enjoyable.

The original plant opened in 1783 and continued operating until 1851, when English law imposed heavy duties on the exported glass and made the operation unprofitable. With the help of the Irish government, Waterford reopened on a small scale in 1947 and has since outgrown its buildings several times.

A Waterford chandelier hangs in Independence Hall in Philadelphia and 16 of them are in Westminster Abbey.Chamber of Commerce Architect John Roberts designed this aristocratic building in 1795 as a home for the Morris family, which was prominent in the shipping trade. The house was purchased by the Chamber of Commerce in 1815.

A large fanlight graces the entrance, and it is worth a look inside to see the beautiful plasterwork and splendid oval staircase.Clock Tower Waterford - Nineteenth century sea captains relied on this landmark along the quays to keep their ships on schedule. It once had troughs of water at its base from which horses could drink, and was thus known as the Fountain Clock. Built in 1861, the original clock was replaced in 1954. The Quay. Cathedral of the Most Holy Trinity After the confiscation of their churches in the mid17th century, the Catholics of Waterford did not receive permission from the city's Protestant controlled government to build another until 1792.

Architect John Roberts designed it for them and it was completed in 1796. The cathedral has a beautifully carved oak pulpit. Barronstrand St.

Lady Lane This little passage has been described as the best surviving example of a medieval street in Waterford. It is a charming lane with Georgian doorways on one side and two old stone carvings (one dated 1613) visible on the wall of the Franciscan friary on the other side. On Broad St., off Upper Barronstrand St.

Christ Church Cathedral Waterford - John Roberts also designed this Protestant church, which was completed in 1779 on the site of an earlier church erected by the Norsemen in 1050. The Norsemen had made Waterford a diocese of its own, and the old church grew in size and property through several centuries until Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Later, Cromwellian troops occupied the original church for a time.

The present cathedral incorporates some monuments from the old church and a number of interesting tombs. Cathedral Sq.French Church Founded as a Franciscan abbey in 1240, this once included six chambers, a kitchen with four cellars, and stables, in addition to the church whose ruined nave, choir, and Lady Chapel still remain.

After it was dissolved by Henry VIII, the friary saw use as a hospital, a burial place for some of Waterford's prominent families, and a parish church for French Huguenot refugees. Architect Roberts is among those buried here. Obtain the key to visit the church from the house across the road; a notice on the door gives the address. Bailey's New St.

Reginald's Tower Waterford -This 70-foot stone tower on the quays was built for defense by Reginald the Dane in 1003. It was captured by Strong bow in 1170, and has been used as a mint, a military storehouse, and an air raid shelter. It now houses a historical museum containing the city's original charters, swords, and municipal munitions.

Corner of the Quay and the Mall. Father Luke Wadding and the Mall This statue just across the street from Reginald's Tower commemorates the birth in 1588 of one of Waterford's most distinguished sons. The Franciscan scholar was famous as a linguist and author of the annals of his order, and although he spent most of his life in Rome, he helped his Catholic countrymen both morally and financially in their attempts to establish their own constitution and government. The Tower hotel on the left is on the site of the old bowling green.

City Hall Waterford was completed in 1788 for the merchants of Waterford, now houses a museum (see Museums) and the Theatre Royal as well as administrative offices. Behind City Hall is the Bishop's Palace, designed in 1741 by Richard Castle, who also designed Powerscourt, Westport House, and the Irish Parliament and the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. It now is used by the city engineering staff.

Places to go in Waterford

The Waterford International Festival of Light Opera has been taking place every September for over 20 years. For 2 weeks, amateur companies from England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic compete to give the best performance of an operetta or musical, and visitors to Waterford have a chance to see and hear again such popular productions as The Merry Widow, Oliver, Soulh Pacific, and the like.

Fringe events include a ball, band concerts, bridge tour name,lts, sports competitions, and singing competitions in the pubs, which, as usual during a festival in Ireland, are open late. Tickets are reasonably priced and can be obtained along with specific information on programs and dates from Sean Dower, Secretary of the Waterford Festival, New St., Waterford.

Sligo City Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:58:00 +0000

Ireland's greatest poet, W. B. Yeats, spent his childhood summers in Sligo, most of the time staying with his uncle at Rosses Point, a peninsula at the entrance to the harbor. Fortunately for Sligo and for the county of which it is the principal city the passion he developed for this rare land inspired verse that immortalized many of the secret places he discovered and explored during his wanderings among the woodlands and on the lake shores and mountains.

Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, once declared: The place that really influenced my life was Sligo. His brother, Jack Yeats, who may well be the greatest painter produced by Ireland, also found that Sligo fired his artistic soul and impelled him to enshrine its countless charms on canvas.

Yeats died in France in 1939. When his remains were brought back to Ireland after the war, it was to Sligo that he was carried as the Irish nation mourned. Beneath the noble brow of Ben Bulben, in the churchyard of Drumcliffe, just outside the city, he rests today with the epitaph he wrote. It is the final three lines of Under Ben Bulben.

Sligo City, set on a verdant, wooded plain, sprawls across the banks of a river that rushes from Lough Gill to the Atlantic Ocean. On all but its ocean side, timeless mountains rise up to form majestic ramparts against the everchanging western sky. Here, amid these pleasantly watered woodlands and mighty shouldered mountains, Yeats discovered the poetic soul of Ireland's Celtic past.

That past, with its mystical legends and sagas of heroic deeds, haunts the enchanted countryside and crowds the pavements of Sligo City itself. The country dominates the town: While walking the city streets, it's impossible to ignore its brooding presence.

Unlike some other Irish cities, Sligo has no abundance of relics and monuments to chronicle the march of its history, but nearby is a truly astonishing record of its prehistoric past, just 2 miles south of the city, at Carrowmore, lies a sprawling megalithic burial ground dating from before the Bronze Age. Its primitive rock monuments provide dramatic evidence that there once lived a race of people capable of transporting massive boulders and raising enormous slabs of stone to mark the resting place of their dead.

Modern scholars cannot determine whether this race was related to characters in the legends of Finn MacCool and the Fianna among the most exciting heroes of Celtic mythology but the locality is rich in ancient folklore, which Yeats transmuted into the lyrical romantic verse of his early poetry. Rising straight up from this prehistoric home of the dead is the noble, flat-topped mountain of Knocknarea (pronounced Knocknaray), the hill of the monarchs, surmounted by a rock cairn reputed to be the tomb of Queen Maeve, or Medb, of Connacht, the province in which Sligo is located.
According to Celtic myth, Maeve was the powerful queen who sent her warriors into the province of Ulster to capture a prized bull in the celebrated Cattle Raid of Cooley.

She is mentioned as Queen Meb in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and, for all the exotic and fanciful legends that surround her, she probably really did exist.Inishmurray: the only true island off the coast of Sligo, has been occupied from prehistoric to modern times. It was the site of a monastic community that was founded in the 6th century and that flourished until Elizabethan times.

Columba is said to have retired to Inishmurray after having committed a grievous sin; as part of his penance, he then went to Scotland to found the monastery of lona.One of the first mentions of Sligo in old records tells of a raid by Vikings in the 9th century. It is probable that the settlement on the banks of the river Sligeach, from which it got its name and which is now called the Garavogue had been established and functioning for many years before it came to the attention of the Norse pirates who were constant visitors to all the coasts of Ireland.

The history of Sligo Ireland

Sligo emerged from the dark veils of early history in the 13th century when an AngloNorman named Maurice Fitzgerald arrived and built a castle at the eastern end of what now is called Castle Street. The De Burgo clan, who Wielded great power along the western coast, also built a castle in Sligo in 1301. No trace of either fortress can be found today, nor is there evidence of walls having surrounded the medieval city, though primitive forms of earthen defenses are shown on 17thcentury maps. The O'Donnells from Donegal destroyed the Fitzgerald Castle in 1270 and again in 1369 after it had been rebuilt.

The most solid relic of Sligo's medieval past is the Dominican abbey, constructed The abbey suffered much damage in an accidental fire but that was nothing compared with what happened when Cromwell's soldiers, on their rampage of terror across Ireland, arrived.They not only set fire to the abbey but killed all the friars and then ran amok through the city streets, setting every building ablaze and slaughtering all the inhabitants they could find.

Throughout the 19th century, Sligo was one of the busiest ports in Ireland, With as many as 600 ships using the harbor every year. During the famine in the 1840s, thousands of Irish emigrants bound for North America sailed from Sligo, many risking their lives on the notorious coffin ships, so named because of the appalling conditions on board. Nowadays, Sligo's sea traffic has dwindled to a few small freighters that irregularly call.

Since the end of the 17th century to the present, the course of events in Sligo has, for the most part, been remarkably harmonious and trouble free even during the War of Independence, which led to the British departure from the southern part of Ireland in the I 920s, the city managed to avoid much of the violence that convulsed the whole island for several years. Today Sligo is a prosperous and thriving city with a progressive vision of its future as well as a keen appreciation of the colorful richness of its past.

Green Fort This unusual, square earthen fort dates from the early 17th century. Built on a height above the river Garavogue, it has star-shaped bastions at each corner and commands a sweeping view of the city and countryside northeast of Connaughton Rd. Yeats Watch Tower A turret on top of a stone building is where the poet, as a young boy, spent hours every day gazing out over the city and the harbor.

The building was owned by his grandfather William Pollexfen, who liked to station himself in the turret with a telescope and watch the comings and goings of the many merchant ships that he owned.

Things to do in Sligo and airport car hire

Ireland and Sligo is a diverse land, which can be explored and discovered by hire car from the airport in Dublin or Knock. Car rentals can be pre-booked at all Ireland airports, and great rates make car hire the easiest way to get around Sligo and the outlying areas.

Riverside Walk - This is a pleasant stroll around the center of town starting at the Douglas Hyde Bridge, which joins Wine Street to Stephen Street, and continuing upstream along the waters of the Garavogue, crossing Thomas Street into Kennedy Parade (named after John F. Kennedy). The walk ends close to the Dominican abbey. Doorly Park Continue upstream alongside the Garavogue on Riverside Walk to reach Doorly Park, a spacious and tranquil woodland retreat close to Lough Gill, with splendid views of the surrounding mountains.

Drumcliffe Sligo- The parish of Drumcliffe, 4 miles north of Sligo , is the most important shrine in Yeats country. The poet is buried here in what is one of the most visited cemeteries in Ireland. The church is on the right, just before the river, and Yeats's grave is just inside the main gate to the left. Yeats's great grand father had been rector in this church, set in wildly magnificent scenery at the foot of the mountain called Ben Bulben.

The fine Celtic cross in the churchyard dates from the II th century. Across the road from the church lies the base of an unfinished round tower thought to have been started in the 6th century. Also during that period, St. Columba founded a monastery here to which was attached a house of studies that attracted scholars from many lands in the golden age of Irish Christianity.

Inishmurray Sligo - An excursion to this island, 4 miles off the northwest Sligo coast and about 12 miles from Sligo City, is a very worthwhile day trip. Inishmurray, which was inhabited until 1947 (when it still had its own king), was the site of a monastic settlement established by St. Molaise in the 6th century. The ruins of the monastery are still there, along with a stone church and the beehive cells where the monks lived.

All over the island are numerous ancient crosses and tombstones and, reflecting the less ecclesiastical side of life in the past, a collection of the Cocha Breaca (pronounced Kuhha Brahka), cursing stones, which were used to invoke curses and misfortune on enemies. The cursing stones were probably used not by the holy men who dwelt on Inish murray but by the pagans who inhabited the island before their time.

Embarkation point for Inishmurray is the tiny and lovely seaport of Mullaghmore. Take N IS north from Sligo to the village of Cliffoney, then turn left at the sign on entering the village. In summer, boats run regularly to and from Inishmurray;
Carrowmore Sligo -This is the location of one of the largest megalithic graveyards in Europe, covering a square mile at the foot of Knocknarea Mountain. There are more than 40 tombs here, some dating from the Neolithic or late Stone Age many undisturbed since they received the dead. An excavation of one of the tombs uncovered the cremated remains of 18 young girls, aged 18 to 22, beside each of whom lay part of the skull of an older male.

An arrangement of unopened oyster shells nearby Suggests that it might have been a ritual burial. Atop Knockn area Mountain is a cairn that legend holds is the burial place of Queen Maeve of Connacht, although this story, has never been tested by excavation. Carrow more is 2 miles southwest of Shgo on L132; turn left at Strandhill for the burial ground.
Lissadell House Sligo - Set amid rolling wooded hills overlooking the Bay of Drumcliffe, this 19th-century Georgian structure is the childhood home of one of Ireland's greatest woman rebels, Countess Constance Markievicz of the Gore Booth family.

The countess took part in the 1916 insurrection, was imprisoned, and later became the first woman member of Eireann (the Irish Parliament). Yeats, an intimate friend of the Gore Booths, often stayed at Lissadell and once reported seeing a ghost at the bottom of the staircase. Members of the Gore Booth family still live here and always have a welcome for visitors even the unannounced. To tour the gracious old mansion is to be transported into a past age every corridor and room scented with nostalgia.

To reach Lissadell, travel north on N 15, take the first left turn past Drumchffe, and dnve through and beyond Carney for another 6 miles. Hazelwood A lushly wooded area on the northwest shore of Lough Gill, Hazelwood perches on a promontory that juts into the lake and is crisscrossed with shaded paths for walking.

There are a number of picnic areas along the water's edge and beneath the trees. Yeats wrote about this area, I went out to the hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head .... A stately mansion, Hazelwood House; built in the 18th century, stands unoccupied on the shores of the lake. Take L16 east from Sligo for 3 miles and follow the signposts to the wood.
Rosses Point Sligo - With two superb beaches and miles of sand dunes, this peninsula is Sligo's premier seaside resort. Much of Yeats's time in Sligo was spent at Rosses Point in Elsinore Lodge, the residence of his cousins, the Middletons, a wealthy merchant family.

Just offshore on a stone pedestal in the sea stands the famous statue of the Metal Man, a 12-foot high sailor forever pointing to the deepest part of the channel to gUide ships into Sligo harbor. In olden days, the area was notorious as a haunt of smggle.rs. Yeats wrote of people hanging out lanterns at the dead of mght near Deadman s Pomt to guide in smuggling ships carrying contraband cargo from France. LI6 northwest from Sligo goes to Rosses Point.

Coney Island Sligo - At the entrance to the Sligo harbor, this small island is home to only a handful of people nowadays. It is said that, walking along Green Road, whIch circumnavigates Coney, one can see all of the rest of County Shgo across the bay. People on the island claim that it gave its name to the more famous Coney Island in New York City.
In Irish, Coney Island means the island of rabbits,' and some believe that the captain of the merchant ship Arethusa, which regularly sailed between Sligo and New York in the 19th century, observed that the Brooklyn island also was overrun with rabbits and called it Coney, too.

The rabbits have since vanished from New York's Coney Island, but they're still hopping about by the thousands among the sand dunes of its Sligo namesake. Boats make the 5-minute trip to Coney Island from the pier at Rosses Point daily in summer; the schedule varies.Creevykeel Court Tomb A magnificent 3,000-yearold court tomb excavated in 1935 by a Harvard archaeologist, it contains several chambers and a gallery, all surrounded by a courtyard.

Drive north on N 15 to the village of Cliffoney and travel another I 2 miles on the same road to where the tomb is sign posted .Dooney Rock This is a massive outcrop of rock, smothered in woods and rising dramatically above the southern shore of Lough Gill. A nature walk through the trees leads to the top of the rock and a spectacular view over the island studded lake. 4 mIles east of Sligo on L117.

Strandhill Sligo - Because of the shifting sands and strong undertow, swimming is hazardous at Strandhill, a seaside resort famous for the towering Atlantic waves that crash on its long, curved beach. However, some people are willing to take the chance. LI32 west from Sligo leads to Strand hill, 12 miles away.

Killaspugbrone Sligo - A halfmile north of Strandhill, just past Sligo Airport, is Killaspugbrone, one of Ireland's oldest churches (built in St. Patrick's time). Legend has it that St. Patrick lost a tooth here. Revered for centuries as a relic, the tooth can now be seen in the National Museum in Dublin. L132 west from Sligo leads to Strandhill, 12 miles away.

Glencar Sligo - One of the loveliest valleys in Ireland, Glencar has massive mountains crowding in on all sides, waterfalls spilling over precipices, and, at the bottom of the glen, a lake so clear that it reflects the tall trees growing in profusion around its banks.

A small path leads up the mountain to the principal Glencar waterfall, which plunges 50 feet into a pool at the bottom of a cliff. Small, unpaved roads splendid for hiking run up into the mountains. Glencar Lake and the river that runs through it have fine size salmon and sea trout in summer. Take NI6 from Sligo; 8 miles out, turn left at the Waterfall signpost.

Lough Gill Sligo - The lake immortalized in one of Yeats's most famous poems, The Lake Isle of Innisfree (I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree .... ), lies just east of Sligo City, linked to it by the river Garavogue. The beauty of Lough Gill compares favorably with that of the fabled lakes of Killarney in County Kerry, and the poetic Innisfree is only one of many wooded islands decorating its waters. Steep rocky cliffs carpeted in greenery rise from the south shore. To the north and west are the peaks of Ben Bulben and the Cuilcagh Mountains. For a land trip around the lake, travel 4 miles south of Sligo on N4, and turn left at the Lough Gill signpost onto L 117.

Make another left at Dromahair onto L112, and 4 miles beyond, turn left again onto L16 back to Sligo. It is also possible to cruise the lake. During the summer, a water bus leaves Riverside daily.The ride includes music and readings of Yeats's poetry.

Londonderry Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:55:00 +0000

Londonderry more popularly known by its original name, Derry is Northern Ireland's second most important city. Although only 75 miles from Belfast, its position in the northwest corner of the country traditionally has rendered it remote from Northern Ireland's other population centers. This condition has been a disadvantage in some ways, but it has served to slow the rate of change and preserve the city's historic character and appearance. A friendly place for strolling, with quiet Georgian corners, Londonderry gives visitors the feeling of a cozy village.

The history of Londonderry

For those who live in the working city, it's the kind of place, says one bartender, where you can't pretend to be what you're not, because we all know what your grandfather did. It's a cohesive city, even though its very name causes confusion and rankles Nationalists in both the North and the Republic. Some still consider the prefix London added to Derry in the early 17th century during the controversial Plantation period an unwelcome intrusion.

Today, as discussion and dissension about this matter continue, some have chosen to cope with the issue with some humor by using the name Stroke City, and writing Londonderry. Whatever they call their city, its citizens are warmhearted, good-natured people who have remained so in spite of the troubles, both recent and historic.

Progress is, however, now beginning to catch up with Londonderry, which is becoming increasingly modernized. With the worst of the bombings in the latest round of internecine battles now more than a decade past, relative relaxation has returned, and it's back to the economic basics, with everybody most interested in keeping the city on its course of commercial invigoration. Firms are encouraged to relocate to the area in an effort to create jobs for a city that has one of the worst unemployment rates in Western Europe.

A strong civic pride has surfaced in response to extensive redevelopment in the past 15 years, which has resulted in a city that looks and feels attractive, from most angles. Londonderry sports a growing university town atmosphere, as a result of the city's Magee College, now a part of the University of Ulster. The University's College of Tourism, in particular, attracts many students from abroad.

The influx of new people recalls hundreds of thousands who emigrated over several centuries, sailing from Derry's quays, behind the present Guildhall. Most often, it was from economic necessity, and departure was a wrench, as exemplified by the lyrics of the Irish ballad Danny Boy, sung to the Londonderry Air, a poignant melody popularized in the 19th century: '''Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.

Unfortunately, a lack of jobs still forces many Derry sons and daughters to seek employment on distant shores, but, as one young man expressed it, Most want to come back. They get withdrawal symptoms very easily. In all, Londonderry's air today is one of cautious optimism. Not only as a doorway to Donegal, but for its own rewards as well, has the city deserved a visit.

Derry derived from the Gaelic word doire (oak grove) was a densely wooded hilltop when St. Columba (Columcille), fleeing a plague in Donegal, arrived in AD 546 to establish his first abbey. During the ensuing centuries, the religious settlement became known as Derry Columcille.
The abbey was burned down by piratical Danes in 812 the first of a succession of invasions Derry was to endure. Neither the Vikings, who marauded in the area for a few hundred years from the 9th century onward, nor the Normans, who crossed the river Bann and headed west in the 12th century, seem to have left much behind except footprints.

Nevertheless, the city continued to grow in size and importance, and the magnificent medieval church Templemore was built in about 1164. Like other Irish cities, Derry came under English control when King Henry II claimed Ireland in the 12th century. The skirmishes that followed did not seriously damage the city until the 1566 rebellion •Ied by Ulster chieftain Shane O'Neill, during which Templemore was destroyed.

Queen Elizabeth I sent a small army to fortify Derry, but it failed and withdrew. In 1600, an English army led by Sir Henry Docwra besieged and took possession of the city. Docwra called for the erection of huge earthen bulwarks to protect Derry against further invasions, but in 1608 the Irish chieftain Cahir O'Doherty raided the city, and once again it was ruthlessly sacked. O'Doherty was later killed and his lands confiscated.
With the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603, Derry was made a satellite of the city of London, with the resulting name change to Londonderry.

The city fell subject to the policy of Plantation, whereby lands forfeited by vanquished Irish leaders were distributed among English and Scottish colonists. Estates went for a nickel an acre, and the newly created hereditary title of baronet sold for the equivalent of $2,500.
The Baron of Belfast, Sir Arthur Chichester, was given the task of selling the city of Londonderry and the district to the Livery Companies (tradesmen associations) of the city of London, at that time the wealthiest corporation on earth.

Business in Londonderry and airport car hire

With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the big dozen cloth makers, tailors, ironmongers, mercers, vintners, salters, drapers, haberdashers, fishmongers, grocers, goldsmiths, and skinners began to settle the whole area between the river Foyle, the Sperrin Mountains, and the lower river Bann. From 1614 to 1617, the Society of the Governors and Assistants of London of the New Plantation in Ulster within the Realm of Ireland or, more simply, the Irish Society which still is the ground landlord in Londonderry built the famous one-mile-long, 18-foot-thick (on average) city walls, made of earth faced with stone.

Most visitors to Londonderry pre-book a hire car from the airport and make the most of this fascinating region.Today, the fortifications are the most nearly complete city walls left in Britain. The Plantation of Ulster, of which Derry and its history have formed so significant a part, strained the resources of the city of London and its Livery Companies to the limit. This financial drain played a major role in the catastrophic rift that gradually grew between the commoners and the crown, which in turn helped pave the way toward civil war.

The sieges of Londonderry

During the 17th century, Londonderry successfully withstood three more sieges, which added to the veracity of her centuries old epithet Maiden City, given in recognition of the fact that she has never succumbed to the besieging blandishments of any suitor. In 1641 the Irish rose yet again against the English, and in 1648, during the English Civil War, Derry underwent a 4-month attack by Royalist forces. But it was the third siege that was most memorable.

On December 7, 1688, troops loyal to England's deposed Roman Catholic King James II advanced to the walled city of Londonderry to claim it. (James needed a foothold in re-land with which to secure his claim to the English crown.) However, the demand for admission to the city at the Ferryquay Gate was met with hesitation by the city fathers who, although not wanting to oppose James openly he was still their lawful monarch favored the Protestant William, husband of James's daughter Mary as well as prince of Holland's House of Fortune, James waited by Londonderry's walls, but he eventually wearied of the obstinate wretches and retired.

In April 1689, James II resumed in earnest the siege of Londonderry, which was to lat a additional 105 days and become, according to 19th-century English historian Thomas Macaulay, the most memorable siege in the history of the British Isles.

Jacobite troops shelled the city and this time blockaded the river Foyle, throwing a boom across it at the point where the new Foyle Bridge now span to prevent the passage of provision ships.

The strategy was to starve the inhabitants into submission. The only person who deserted the city during its difficulties was the governor, Colonel Lundy, who ended his dishonorable term by advising surrender and then escaping from the city by chopping down a pear tree that stood just outside the city walls.

Provisions for Londonderry's population soon ran short. Hunger enfeebled soldier’s and civilians seized upon dogs, cats, and rats for food. Contemporary price lists show that a lean mouse cost sixpence; a rat, fattened by human flesh, one shilling and two pence; and a quart of horse's blood brought one shilling and a penny. The Inevitable result was disease. More than 7 000 perished, all within sight of a fleet of food filled ships lying at anchor 'just beyond the blockade.

Nevertheless, when James's troops fired a hollowed cannonball at St. Columb's Cathedral that carried a message with the terms for an armistice, Derry's citizens staunchly replied, No surrender which ever since has been the watchword of the city and of Ulster's Loyal Orange lodges.

Finally, on July 30, 1689, the relief ship Mountjoy burst the barrier across the Foyle. In the fighting that followed, high above the thunder of the Irish guns arose the clamor of the Cathedral bells, and the ramparts blazed with on fire. That day the siege was broken, and each year the event is recalled b special celebrations on the city.

Not quite a year later, in 1690, on July 1 which became July 12 when the calendar was changed in the 18th century James II finally lost his throne to King Billy (William III) at the Battle of the Boyne, fought near Drogheda in the Irish Republic.

The port of Londonderry

From early in the 18th century and continuing into the 19th, Londonderry served as the principal port for the wave of emigrants who left Ulster for New World opportunities across the Atlantic. So many Ulster men and women sailed from Derry Quay to America that they became the second most numerous element in the colonial population (the English being the most numerous at that time). Ulster immigrants played a prominent part in the American Revolution as well as in the settlement of the western frontier.

Londonderry also served as a major port of embarkation for the mass migrations from all over Ireland as a result of the potato crop failures and famines of the mid to late 19th century.

In World War II, as the first port across the Atlantic for US and Canadian supply convoys, Derry was tremendously important to the Allies. Many North American troops received early training here for what would eventually be the D-Day invasion of Normandy.(The Republic of Ireland declared neutrality during the war, so its ports were closed to the Allies.)

In addition to thousands of US Navy personnel in port during the war, at least 5,000 US Army staffers were stationed in Derry, which had a major underground communications center at Magee College. US soldiers were active socially in the community, and the army's Springtown camp remained operative until the mid1960s.

Derry's more recent history has been less ennobled. After what can be seen as a classic case of gerrymandering in the creation of two new electoral constituencies in Derry in 1966 which served to exacerbate the conflicts between the Unionists (largely Protestants who wished Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom) and the Nationalists (mostly Catholics who wanted Ulster to rejoin the Irish Republic) on October 5, 1968, the first confrontation in the city's current round of troubles occurred between civil rights demonstrators and the police.

A period of conflict ensued, which, by August 12, 1969, resulted in a state of siege in the Catholic neighborhood of Bogside. Violence was a sadly familiar face on the community during the 1970s. Bombings resulted in the destruction of some buildings and monuments.

The remains of some of these such as Walker's Monument, erected on Royal Bastion of the city walls in 1828 have been left as memorials to this period and are pointed out by city tour guides. However, visitors to today's Derry generally will find the city cleared of the rubble of the past and its citizens enthusiastically looking ahead.

Things to do in Londonderry

The city within the walls, which are roughly rectangular in shape and about a mile in total length, retains its original 17th-century layout, with four main streets radiating from a center square (called the Diamond) to the original gates: Shipquay, Ferryquay (the gate closed against James II by the 13 apprentices in 1688), Butchers, and Bishop. These have all been rebuilt over the centuries, and three newer gates have been added. The main street of the compact city within the walls begins at the Shipquay Gate.

As Shipquay Street arguably the steepest street in Ireland rises to the Diamond, it exudes a decidedly Georgian flavor, although most of the buildings date from Victorian times. Continuing straight across the Diamond, the road becomes Bishop Street.Along its several blocks before the street reaches Bishop's Gate at the top are many of the city's finest buildings: the Northern Counties Club; the 1830 Deanery, with its fine classical Georgian doorway; The Honorable Irish Society headquarters, inscribed with the date 1764; and the Courthouse. Derry has several good Georgian residential row house terraces, in particular those on Clarendon, Queen, and Bishop Streets.

The Walls Londonderry's most notable physical feature, the walls, form a ace walk around the Inner city. Each bastion has Its own name and story. Coward's Bastion, near O'Doherty's Fort, is so named because it was the safest sector of the city during the siege. On Double Bastion, between Butcher's and Bishop's gates, is Roaring Meg, a brass cannon from 1642 that is' a relic of the siege.

The cannon, which got its name from the violent bang that heralded its use, overlooks the area from which Jacobite troops attacked the city. As we went to press, the walls were being cleaned and refurbished, and it was uncertain whether visitors would be able to walk on the walls after the project is complete.

St Columb´s Cathedral Ireland

St. Columb's Cathedral the Church of Ireland Cathedral is the most historic building in Londonderry. Begun in 1628 and finished in 1633, it has undergone much restoration and alteration, although its facade remains basically the simple, austere, well proportioned Planter's Gothic. The nearby city walls rise higher in this picturesque precinct to protect the cathedral, which fired cannons from its bastions during the 1689 siege.

Just inside the door is the hollowed cannonball that was shot into the churchyard with the proposed terms of surrender; elsewhere in the cathedral and in the chapter-house, other city artefacts are displayed, including locks and keys from the four original gates. Mellowed stones were used to construct this modern castle, which serves as the interpretive center for visitors to the city. The view from the roof is exceptional. Call for details about visiting hours and current exhibitions.

Bishop's Gate Londonderry - The most memorable of the city's four original gates, Bishop's was extended upward into a triumphal arch by William III in 1789, on the centenary of the great siege. Sculptured faces on either side of the arch are river gods of the Foyle and the Boyne. At the top of Bishop St., which rises from the Diamond.

Guildhall Londonderry - The Guildhall was built in Tudor Gothic style of red sandstone from Antrim in 1890. Its richly decorated facade has mullioned and transformed windows and a four faced chiming spire clock that is one of the largest in Britain. Striking stained glass windows throughout the building illustrate almost every episode of note in the city's compelling history.

At the foot of Shipquay St. Derry Quay celebrated in song and story, often sadly, Derry Quay (the popular name for the Foyle Quay), behind the Guildhall, was the embarkation point for hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants including the ancestors of several US presidents who crossed the Atlantic in the 18th and 19th centuries. A small monument recalls the mass emigrations. Foyle Embankment, behind the Guildhall.

St. Eugene's Cathedral,The Roman Catholic cathedral, with its lofty granite spire, was finished in 1873. Built in Gothic Revival style, it is tall and airy, with exceptional stained glass windows depicting the Crucifixion. In the Catholic district called Bogside; reached from Strand Rd. along Great James St.

Long Tower Church (St. Columba's) Just outside the city walls to the southwest, this church was built in 1784, and reconstructed in 1908, on the site of the former Templemore (one of the great Irish medieval churches, built in 1164 and destroyed in 1566).

The church, which seats 2,000, features attractive hand carved woodwork, an unusual sloping balcony, and stained glass. The splendid altarpiece of contrasting marbles displays ancient Corinthian column heads that were the gift of Bishop Hervey, The edifice is surrounded by a complex of church schools, and the view from the churchyard across grassy slopes to the city walls is lovely.

Strabane Americans find Strabane of interest principally because of Gray's Printing Shop , which dates from the 18th century and is still in operation. In the room where some 19th-century presses remain, John Dunlap and James Wilson served as apprentices. Dunlap was the first of the two men to emigrate to Philadelphia, where he founded America's first daily newspaper, The Pennsylvania Packet.

In 1776 he printed the Declaration of Independence from Thomas Jefferson's original manuscript. He was also a captain in General George Washington's bodyguard. By 1807, Wilson too had emigrated to Philadelphia, where he became a judge and a newspaper editor and, eventually, the grandfather of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States.

Limerick City Ireland

noreply@blogger.com (The Car Hire Guy) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:49:00 +0000

The fourth largest city on the Irish Island (pop. 70,000), Belfast included, offers an engaging introduction to the country for those many, many visitors who begin their tour here after the half-hour trip from Shannon Airport. Limerick is a major port, an inevitable product of its enviable position on the river Shannon, and while the city has a reputation for industry, those it is' most famous for are all amiably light: traditional Limerick lace, still produced here; wonderfully cured hams and bacon; salmon fishing; and flour milling.

Limerick (in Irish, Luimneach) is a city of narrow streets, handsome Georgian houses, and impressive public buildings such as the Custom House and the Town Hall. This gracious architecture hardly reflects Limerick's violent history, however. Invaded by the Danes in the early 10th century, the area suffered many long years of skirmishing, which ended only when the Vikings were finally crushed by the Irish chieftain Brian Bonl. He made Limerick the capital of Munster. In the 12th century, the Anglo Normans conquered the town, and, settling on the island formed by the river Shannon and its tributary, the Abbey, they built stout walls to keep the natives at bay.

The history of Limerick Ireland

This area became known as English Town, and the section across the river as Irish Town. Undeterred by walls, the Irish continued to make sallies into English Town, led by the King of Munster, Donal Mor O'Brien. Upon his death in 1194, however, the Normans consolidated their position, and in 1210 King John ordered a strong castle and fortified bridge built to control the crossing point of the river Shannon. In later years the city walls were extended for added security.

During the 17th century the city was torn between revolts by the Irish, who seized the city, and sieges by the English under King William III and his followers, the Williamites. The Treaty of Limerick, signed in 1691, was to end hostilities and grant political and religious liberty to the Irish Catholics, but repeated violations of the treaty forced thousands into exile. Many of Limerick's most important landmarks Thomond Bridge, the city walls, and St. Mary's Cathedral have associations with these turbulent times. This year, the city is celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Limerick with a yearlong program of events (see Special Events below).As befits a city that is the major western gateway to Ireland, contemporary Limerick has a great deal to offer besides its ancient history and sites.

A roster of activities includes fishing, horseback riding, horse racing, golfing, and swimming and boating on the Shannon. The medieval banquets held at the nearby Bunratty and Knappogue castles, as well as the dis at the Folk Park, offer a delightful if somewhat rowdy sampling of traditional Irish hospitality.

The countryside of Limerick and car hire

The best way to get around Limerick is to hire a car at the airport in Ireland when you arrive, and that way you can take advantage of the stunning countryside in the region.The countryside surrounding Limerick has a quiet beauty, perfect for a peaceful day's rambling: Low hill ranges ruffle the plains, and small towns rise here and there, each with its ruined castle, abbey, or bridge.

Unlike most Irish cities, Limerick does not have important literary connections. It is, however, the home of the limerick, that famous five line rhyme derived from a round game in which an individual extemporized a nonsense verse, followed by a chorus that included the words Will you come up to Limerick? Over the years the term limerick became associated with the rhyme scheme aabba, devised by the 19th-century nonsense poet Edward Lear.

Where to go in Limerick Ireland

Thomond Bridge The present bridge, dating from 1840, was designed by Irish architect James Pain to replace the 13th-century structure erected by King John to defend the city, The original had a guardhouse and gate at the west end and a drawbridge at the east end near the castle. The Treaty Stone, on which the famous Treaty of Limerick reputedly was signed in 1691, is on the west side of the new bridge.

Medieval Quarter Limerick - this area is bordered by Mary and Castle Streets and the Granary on Michael Street. Among other notable buildings, it includes King John's Castle and St. Mary's Cathedral as well as a number of almshouses.

King John's Castle Limerick - This fortification at the east foot of Thomond Bridge was built in 1210 by King John to guard the city against invaders. It is one of the oldest examples of Norman architecture in Ireland, with rounded gate towers standing sentry over the curtain walls. In the 18th century, military barracks were installed within the walls,and, later, houses were built i the castle yard, some of which remain, As went to press, the castle was closed Indefinitely for excavations of what is believed to be a Viking settlement. For more Information, contact the tourist office.

St. Mary's Cathedral Limerick was established in 1172 by Donal Mor O'Brien, the last King of Munster, It has been restored and extended a number of times and combines features from many different centuries. Note especially the unusual (and unique in Ireland) 15th century choir stalls whose misericords are carved with many medieval emblems including those of Richard III.

Ball's Bridge Limerick - The original structure on this location linked the turf of the conquerers with that of the natives Irish Town, The bridge had no battlements, but rather supported a row of houses. These disappeared in 1830 when the present bridge was constructed.
Limerick Walls Forming a rough diamond shape, the Limerick walls run east and southeast from Ball's Bridge, along Old Clare and Lelia streets to the grounds of St. John's Hospital. There were four main gates: East Watergate, John's Gate, Mungret Gate, and West Watergate. The largest remaining portion of the walls is behind Lelia Street.

Traces of the Black Battery (where a small band of defenders successfully resisted ) are found on the hospital grounds, while a badly deteriorated bit can be seen from Pike's Row in the direction of High Street.There are two other sections one forming part of the building housing Sinnotts Joinery Works and the other standing in the Charlotte Quay parking lot.

St. John's Cathedral Originally intended as a parish church, this Gothic Revival cathedral built in the 19th century eventually became the see of the Catholic diocese, It houses two of Ireland's most remarkable ecclesiastical treasures, the magnificently carved miter and crozier made by Cornelius O'Dea, who was one of Limerick's bishops In the 15th century, At 280 feet, St. John's spire is the highest in Ireland; it's more ornate than the rest of the structure. The memorial to Patrick Sarsfield, hero of the 1690-91 sieges, which is located on the cathedral grounds, was rendered by John Lawlor of Dublin in 1881. At Cathedral Place.

St. John's Square A few steps from the cathedral, this square constructed around 1751 was once lined with fashionable stone houses owned by the local gentry, The square declined slowly over the years until the 20th century, when the houses were used less. Glamorously as offices, tenements, barracks, and a butcher shop.

Eventually they fell Into neglect and were abandoned, but the square has recently undergone restoration and the area is being revived, Newtown Pery Just 200 years old, this is the new part of Limerick a grid of streets roughly extending between Sarsfield Street on the north and the Crescent on the south.

Named after Edward Sexton Pery, a speaker of the Irish House of Commons, under whose patronage the renovation was begun, the development was distinctly Georgian In character, with townhouses constructed of red brick. In the Crescent is a memorial to Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator founder of the movement for Catholic emancipation rendered by Irish sculptor John Hogan in 1857.

Granary Originally opened as a Georgian grain store in 1787, this old building was renovated a decade ago and has become the social and commercial hub of Limerick :Ife. Set among the quays near the river Shannon, it includes a tourist office, the city library, shops, restaurants, and taverns.

Limerick places to go

Bunratty Castle and Folk Park The original castle on this site was built in the 15th century by the McNamara family but was appropriated around 1500 by Conor O'Brien, Earl of Thomond. Refurbished in the 1950s, it is now famous for the colorful medieval banquets presented in the great hall every evening (see Nightclubs and Nightlife), but the castle also houses an incredible collection of European paintings, furniture, and tapestries dating from the 14th to the 17th century. From the battlements, the view of the surrounding countryside is splendid as it was for the earl's warriors.

Behind the castle is a model village, with cottages, a replica of a 19thcentury hotel, . school, doctor's office, pub. post office, print shop, workshops, and exhibits demonstrating how people in different regions of Ireland lived and labored years ago: The castle and folk park are both on the main Ennis road. Admission charge. Quin Abbey Although the Franciscan friary, dating from 1402, is now roofless and in ruins. the tombs of the founding McNamara clan are still intact.

Quin Craggaunowen -This project, like Bunratty, was developed to document lifestyles in Ireland long ago. The complex has both a ring fort dating from early Christian times and a crannog, or lake dwelling (stone hut situated on an island). typical of the Bronze Age.
The castle on the grounds is a fortress built by the McNamara family in the 14th century. In the intervening years it suffered neglect, but it is now restored and contains many medieval artifacts.

Ballycasey Craft Courtyard and Design Centre Limerick - The crafts workshops here encompass everything from basketry to leatherwork to pottery. Adjacent to the center stands Balleycaseymore House, a Georgian style building that contains an international art gallery. Both attractions are open daily year-round. Shannon, 10 miles west of Limerick, about 3 miles from Shannon Airport.

Laugh Gur, Dublin - Around this lake are found a number of ancient ruins, including stone circles, cairns, dolmens, and crannogs. Human bones, weapons, and pottery have all been unearthed here and experts estimate earliest habitation of the site to be 2000 BC.
A guide to the area and a self guided walking tour booklet can be obtained from the Limerick Tourist Board.

Hunt Museum Limerick - Donated by Celtic historian John Hunt, who also sponsored the Craggaunowen project in Quin, this is a collection of many artifacts found in Ireland dating from the Bronze and Early Iron ages.

Flying Boat Museum Limerick - An aviation and maritime center at Foynes (a small town southwest of Limerick City on the Shannon estuary), this museum focuses on Ireland's importance in the development of air travel from the US. In the early days of transatlantic flights, from the 1930s to the mid1940s, Foynes was a principal landing, take-off, and berthing port in Europe for flying boats and sea planes.

The museum houses a variety of memorabilia and equipment including an original terminal; a working version of the Short brothers' Sunderland Flying Boat; radio, navigation, and meteorological devices; and film footage from the flying boat era. There is also a tearoom with 1940s-style decor.

Knappogue Castle Limerick - Built in 1467 by the McNamara family, this castle was bought in 1966 by an American and restored to its original l5th-century elegance. Surrounded by lush green pastures and grazing cattle, Knappogue presents an imposing front.The interior is no less impressive, with its soaring ceilings and handsome antique furnishings. Ask to see the owners' magnificent private dining room.