Blarney Castle and Cork Gaol

Beautiful morning at Blarney Castle.
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I KISSED THE BLARNEY STONE!!  I don't have a picture on my computer of me doing it, but I have a hard copy that I had to pay for.  If you want to see the picture, you gotta come here and see it!

So we flew from Edinburgh to Shannon, Ireland, then took a bus to Cork.  We met a kid from New York who's studying in Athens while we were on the plane, but he was going to Galway, I think, so we didn't see much more of him than that.  The bus ride was scenic, but I admittedly saw very little because I had the horrible habit of falling asleep.  The ride took something like two-and-a-half hours, and the bus dropped us of smack-dab in the middle of the city.  We went to the hostel (which was pretty nice, by the way--if you ever go to Cork and are willing to stay in a hostel, stay at Kinlay House), unloaded our stuff, and then went in search of food.  We ended up at this second-story mom and pop's called, "Adam and Eve's", and were treated like princesses.  The food was great, and the owners were really nice.

The castle from across the stream.
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That night was Halloween, but we were all tuckered out and needed to do some sketching, so we went back to the hostel and watched TV and sketched.

The next day we got up early, and went over to Blarney Castle first thing.  When we got there, there was still dew on the ground, and we were pretty much the only people there for a while.  We climbed around in the dungeons, then moved into the castle.  IT WAS AWESOME!!!!  I've always wanted to go in a castle, and it was even better than I imagined!  To be perfectly honest, I could probably tour Great Britain and Ireland and just go from castle ruin to castle ruin.  It was such a cramped space for such a large building; it's so interesting to imagine people living there at one point--AND IN DRESSES.  Granted, it's a little more rough around the edges than I'm sure it was when it was first built, but the spaces are still so small at points.  When I go to a place like that, all I can imagine is what it must have been like to live there.  I have a horribly romanticized view, I'm sure, of what life was like (too many movies and historic romance novels), but I can't help but try to put myself there.  I think that's more of what I want from architecture--to preserve the way of life that centered around the building when it was built or in its hey-day--than to preserve the actual building itself.  I can't help but think how, a hundred years down the road, people will look back at what life is like now, and wonder how we ever got by without technology.  Sort of how I look back and wonder how we ever got by without computers.  It's all so interesting.

Dungeon picture... spooooooky...
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Anyway, enough with my preaching about history and buildings; I guess I'm in a thoughtful mood today.  After Blarney Castle, we went back into Cork and went shopping and sight-seeing.  We were pretty tuckered out from getting so excited about Blarney Castle, that we didn't do much else.

The next day we went to Cork Gaol, or the city jail.  Part of the jail is preserved and restored, but the rest of it is just empty--how it was left in the 60s or something, after it had been adapted to be a radio station.  It's really gloomy and depressing, and there are outbuildings behind the prison which were the infirmary and other things, but they just stand there, empty.  We walked through the infirmary, though I'm not sure we were supposed to, and I thought it was cooler than the actual prison itself.

Entrance into the dungeon. There were no lights, but you were allowed to walk around in them. We didn't have flashlights (we could have bought one from the gift shop, but they were really expensive), so we tried using our cell phones and cameras to see deeper. It was super-cool.
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Overall, Cork and Blarney were great places to visit, and I'd definitely like to go back to that area.  It was neat how layered the history is everywhere, and Cork, even though it's relatively small, is a perfect example of that.