Revisiting Ireland

Wednesday, September 3

Nenagh

This was a wonderfully interesting low-key day. We left Limerick, with Paul driving, around 9:00. We had talked with him before about our preference for non-tourist places and smaller roads rather than motorways, so he had a nice program mapped out for us. To that program, Judy added a request that we stop for a photo op along the way if it worked out; she wanted good pictures of the black and white dairy cows we had seen along the way. None of the ones we made from the train turned out very well because the tinted windows and the speed of the train combined to make everything a blurry green mess. Before 9:30, passing through Birdhill-Carrigeen in County Tipperary, we stopped for pictures of donkeys and a horse, and within ten minutes we had pulled over for cows in Carrigator-Bushfield. (I have to admit that the iPhone Photos app told me where we made those photos. It was a mystery to me at the time.)

After that we tootled on to Nenagh, Paul’s first planned stop. First we walked through a small park to the ruins of the old castle wall, then we went into the surviving part: the round tower. I climbed the steps–original narrow stone things from the first floor above ground–to the top. The town has been really well done, and I enjoyed taking a lot of photos from the top. The church next door made a particularly nice subject, as did the remains of the castle walls down below the tower. On the way back down I stopped on a couple of the old living areas of the tower, and that’s when I realized that the narrow stairs spiraled upwards completely enclosed within the walls. Just like what I saw in King John’s castle, the walls were crazy thick, but these window niches had built-in benches along the sides. Given the small area of the windows, that was probably the only way to see anything in those gloomy rooms when people lived there.

When we left the tower, we walked back through the park (I got another good shot of the church) and looked in on the Heritage/Genealogical Centre, at first only because we wanted to see about using their toilets. The man in the office was very welcoming and told us a lot of the history of their interesting looking building. I had originally been the office of the governor of a prison built in 1830. It had been in full operation during the potato famine in the 1840s, providing food and shelter for people sentenced to minor crimes. None of the original housing unites remain; only the central building is there.

Fifteen minutes after we left Nenagh, we made one more stop for a field of cows before we drove through a rest stop outside Moneygall, just to get a photo of the sign: Barack Obama Plaza. The Hayes side of his family is from here.

Roscrea

Our next stop was Roscrea, where we visited a 1722 house that had been built within the Medieval castle walls. We did hit the garden, sadly a little past its summer beauty, but we didn’t go inside the square tower. Just like the situation in Nenagh, these survivors of an earlier time are just right there in the middle of town, not separated off apart from the life around them at all. Just like they’ve always been. That’s nice.

While we were in Roscrea we also stopped at their heritage center, built around the old Black Mills that were important centuries ago. The place has a beautiful old cross–St. Cronan’s– from the twelfth century. It was in pieces and had fallen into disrepair, but had been partially reconstructed and was on display here. There’s also a slightly shortened round tower on the grounds. Artillery practice in the past was responsible for its reduce stature. Notable, there is a drawing of a ship on one of the walls of a window high up the tower, but we couldn’t go in to see it. It’s inaccessible, and the thought of what tourists could do to a surviving drawing etched into the stone is really sad. 

We did go inside the old church across the street from the Centre, though. The entry was through the graveyard, giving us a good view of the tower across the street. There were a couple of leafless hawthorns there that would have given the place a great halloween atmosphere at night. It was interesting to see names on individual pews, no doubt of families who had been around Roscrea for generations. Some of the pews had tattered rugs on the floor to keep feet warm, and the whole building seemed to be older than the house we had just left. I did see an organ in the gallery, but we didn’t take time to go up and check it out. Besides, there were workmen around, repairing the front door, so it didn’t look like a good time to start wandering around too much.

After we left Roscrea and headed toward lunch on the Heath, Paul pulled over and backed up so we could see the remains of a stone cottage and attached barn, right there alongside the road. Thile we were looking at that, and wondering about a sign that warned us (and anyone else, of course) not to cut the Japanese Knot Weed, Judy spotted some cows head our way. Apparently they thought we had lunch for them, because six of them trotted right up to the fence and stared at us with more than a little hope in their hearts! 

That was just about our final stop on this trip. We did have lunch at Treacy’s on the Heath, a place near Portlaoise that we both heartily recommend. After that it was on to the Dublin airport, goodbye to Paul, a night in a huge–HUGE–hotel before we flew out the next morning. One more night in a Hampton Inn in Boston and we were home the next day, complete with another batch of travel memories.

Final Visits and Heading Home

Boston and Kildare | Cobh and Midleton | Limerick | Nenagh and Roscrea