We started our day with a very nice breakfast at our B&B. The hostess seems quite concerned if we don’t eat enough! Particularly of the traditional Irish breakfast which consists of a fried egg, a couple of pieces of bacon (English style), a couple of sausages, other unknown meat slices, orange juice, and some cold cereal. That works fine for me, but Nina is definitely not a traditional breakfast eater. We’ll see what tomorrow morning brings!
Our bedroom is on the bottom right. It’s a lovely home and a very nice yard (called a ‘garden’ over here), but the road to the house is literally a double-track dirt road.
Our first stop was at an ATM machine in Galway. I simply type ATM into the Google Maps search bar and up comes all the ATM machines in my area. Nearby was a small Franciscan Abby church so we spent a few minutes inside. It was a simple, very comfortable Catholic church getting ready to say mass about 30 minutes later and parishioners were starting to come in. From there we went to the Galway Cathedral. It was nice, but very modern (built in the 1950’s and refurbished in the 90’s). No visitors allowed during high mass which was at 9am and again at 11am.
The Franciscan Abbey looks like a well-used church and feels quite like a downtown church should feel.
The cathedral sits on the north side of the River Shannon and is a bit north of the center of town. The town built the cathedral in the 1950’s so that Galway could finally be called “a cathedral city.”
By 10:30 we were pretty much done with anything in downtown Galway, so off we went about an hour east of Galway to a national treasure site Clonmacnoise (CLONE-mc-NOIS). This was a monastic community started in 544 AD and decimated by the English in 1552 AD, just about the time of a great reformation in the Church of Ireland and the demise of monastic communities.
Clonmacnoise (in Gaelic it’s written as Cluan mhic Nois) was founded by St. Ciaran along with twelve companions on what was then junction of the two major trade routes, one overland between Dublin and Galway and the other down the Shannon River. Today it’s way out in the countryside. Back then it was the center of a major community of artisans, journeymen, farmers, and tradesmen. During its history it was attacked 27 times by the Irish, 9 times by the Vikings, and 6 times by the Normans. The monastery and town were rebuilt every time until the English laid the town and monastery to ruin.
The West Holy High Cross stands on the west side of what was the cathedral. Traditionally cathedrals were built facing east-west with High Crosses located at the four compass points. We joined a tour lead by a very delightful, red-haired Irish woman who lived about 20 miles away. She described three of the four High Crosses as the 4th one had been stolen away by a neighboring town. At the end of the tour she let us know that the High Crosses we were looking at were all fakes … replicas. The originals had been moved into a nearby museum for preservation.
This doorway into the cathedral was added in the 10th century when the south wall was rebuilt (next picture). It’s a “whisper arch” … a person standing facing the archway on the left can clearly hear a person facing the archway on the right whispering and vice versa.
That was our tour guide standing next to the wall explaining to us how they can date the construction of the wall. Scaffolding was not known until the 11th century. In the 10th century stone masons would insert timbers in the wall as the wall was being built to stick out far enough to lay planks down to act as a kind of a scaffold. When the wall was finished they would cut the timbers off flush with the wall, plaster the wall, and after white-washing would be done. Eventually the plaster fell off and the timbers rotted away leaving the holes in the wall.
Need to cure a wart? These stones with a hole in them date back to pre-Christian paganism and had Christianity wrapped around them. The stone is placed close to the tomb of a saint (the tilted structure in the background). The water that accumulates in the hole is supposed to be “touched” by the saint and have medicinal properties. This one cured warts.
St. Ciaran, who founded this monastic community, died at the age of 33 from the yellow plague just a couple years after settling here. He was buried supposedly here and the structure built later. Excavations didn’t yield any bones. The supposition is that they were carried off elsewhere as relics. A lot of preservation work has been done to keep the structure from collapsing entirely. People would try to bury their dead as close to the walls of a saint’s tomb as possible. In addition, people would carry off dirt from around the tomb of a saint to put in their fields as a ward against disease (specifically potato blight here in Ireland) … a practice that still happens covertly despite efforts to stop it.
Even though Clonmacnoise was sacked by the English and left in ruins in 1554, the place continued to be used as a graveyard. Thousands of graves, some as recent as last month, populate the grounds, giving truth to the phrase, “people are just dying to get in here.”
We spent the entire afternoon wandering around the buildings, graves, and an adjacent convent. We had a light lunch at a small cafe in the visitors center. Then we drove back to the little village of Barna where out B&B is located. We drove down to the pier where Nina got a small dose of the ocean and then we had a scrumptious dinner at a local restaurant.
Tomorrow we’ll take the ferry out to the Aran Islands and get ready to go to Belfast on Sunday.
We’re slowly figuring out things with the car. When I’m stopped, if I put the car into neutral and release the clutch, the car engine turns off. As soon as I press on the clutch, it starts again. Works great when driving through Galway during rush hour where there were very long waits. Also, the car knows somehow what the speed limit is, which is displayed in the right center of the speedometer / tachometer display. When we pass a speed limit sign, the dash always displays the new limit just as we pass. There is wifi in the car. Nina is able to send and receive text messages, look at web pages, and just about anything data related (no phone calls) when we’re driving around. It isn’t incurring any roaming data charges, as everything possible about roaming is turned off. Maybe that’s how the car know the speed limit?
But, we haven’t figured out the radio, yet. Nina found a small document that may help. We’ll need to spend some time sitting in the car not in traffic to see if we can get some music.
Our room at the at the Carrig House B&B (Truskey East, Barna, Co. Galway, H91 H6TT) is very nice, but there’s no clock in the room! I think I’ve figured out how to turn the heat on. I’ll know for sure in an hour or so.
Nope. No heat. Time for bed … and there’s no hair dryer for Nina.