Wednesday, 16 August 2000
9:10 a.m. --
in Busaras (BUH' saw-rus), the main bus station north of the
River Liffey. This is Bus Eireann headquarters. We leave here at
ten o'clock for the burial mound at Newgrange. Amazingly quiet
here for such a large crowd, well over 100 people waiting for
their buses to go all over the country. Real tile floors are a
pinkish-grey speckled composite with green granite stripes
running diagonally. (There goes the Donegal crew,- over 20 folks
lined/queued in front of my seat.) The fluted columns are set
with tiny tiles in vertical stripes, light greenish-grey and a
warm dark mocha brown. The ceiling of cork diagonally-laid tiles
must be 10 meters high and the walls are all glass (thermopane)
on three sides. The fourth side is offices over ticket counters
and concession stands. It's a light, airy, clean space with
fabric-covered seats spaced well apart.
As we started out, our driver, Mr. Pat Treacy, told us that the bus station, built in 1953, has a "preservation order" on it. It received an architectural award for excellence and beauty in design. So, even though traffic has increased to the point that as many busses go in and out in 10 minutes now as used it in an entire day in the 1950s, it cannot be altered or enlarged, only "restored." A scheduling nightmare!
Photos: brick houses (duplexes or row houses) are the most common in towns and suburbs. The walled-in front yards are usually neat and carefully landscaped with flower beds around the edge, a walkway in the middle (going up to the front door) and 2 specimen trees, each in the exact center of the patches of grass on either side of the walk.
Royal = Canal
Lots of tulip trees and palmettos in yards and along streets. Very level country once we got out of the Liffey valley, which reminded me of the lake-silt plains of the Mid-west U. S.
We passed Swords (Sords) and Malihide in the north part of County Dublin. mild climate near the sea, last frosts are in March. Agricultural land, many greenhouses and large fields. Roadside stands are selling new potatoes and other vegetables.
Mr Treacy pointed out a large stone ruin surrounded by untilled land in the middle of a wide flat stubbled grainfield. That building was a "workhouse" during the Famine, where farm families were sent when they couldn't pay their rent. [The English had set up a plantation system about 200 years earlier. The families who had lived on their land since time immemorial were classified as sharecroppers who had to grow a cash crop to pay their rent to the landlord who had been installed over them by the government.] The untilled area around it holds the unmarked graves (about 5,000) of those who didn't survive to be shipped overseas. As many as 30 people per day died there. Every county had several of these workhouses, built by the first wave of inmates. Most of the tall stone walls alongside the major roads in Ireland were also built by dispossessed farm families during the Famine. They were among the "public works" projects set up to feed the labourers. Mr. Treacy's voice carried a tone of pain as he described people's suffering during the Famine which made me feel sick to my stomach.
Drogheda (dro-HEE'ah) is a town with old medieval streets. What buildings Cromwell didn't destroy, one can visit. It's a good town to walk around, many old lanes. The medieval fort, built on a burial mound is a museum. The Boyne River runs through Drogheda. There are lots of sheep north of town, and more "suburbanites," with their homes along the road and cropland behind them.
Our driver warned us about it, but I was surprised at the narrowness of the road to Monasterboice. We swung left into what looked like a hedge-lined driveway, about half the width of the little "back road" that I live on. Our bus, which was slightly narrower than an U.S. school bus, was within 3 feet of the hedges on either side. When a car met us, Mr. Treacy crunched the bus into the hedge to let it past.
St. Buite (pronounced with a "you" in the middle, like the city of Butte, Montana) founded Monasterboice about 1,500 years ago. It is a Celtic Christian site. The tower is surrounded by rock walls of buildings, and nearly every inch of the visible monastery ruins is a cemetery. The local people have been burying their dead here since the monastery closed down after the Roman church reformulated the monastic rules about 800 years ago. There is a stone Celtic cross that must be 20 feet tall, covered with carvings. There are Old Testament stories illustrated on one side and New Testament stories on the other. On the top, there is a little house carved out of stone. According to the guide, these little houses were often the "homes" of a saint's relics. However, this one seems to have no way in; it's solid stone.
Archaeologists believe the monastery had timber sheds and other outbuildings beyond the cemetery area (which is enclosed by an ancient stone wall). They have dug test holes in the hayfield down the slope and found potsherds and post-holes. What's holding up excavation is lack of funds.
We proceeded down that skinny hedge-crowded lane for about six miles to the next abbey, driving through farmyards and around blind hairpin turns. At one point we had to back-and-fill to get across a tiny stone-walled bridge at the middle of one of those sharp corners. After completing this manuver, a tiny car came tearing around the next blind corner and screeched to a halt. Good thing we weren't going any faster! The little car backed up to a near-by driveway and let us past.
Mellifont, the first Cistercian abbey in Ireland, brought a lot of farming advances to Ireland. It took 15 years to build the abbey. The founder, St. Malachy, was a friend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), who gave him all kinds of help (and trained his first batch of monks - Malachy's Irish followers) as well as some French monks who came over for a while to help establish the Cistercian Rule. Malachy and his followers had made a pilgrimage to Rome and stopped at St. Bernard's abbey going and coming.
Palladium;-)
Lustorium
Chapel---pig shed
Why the locals "quarried" and then stopped --- politics
Lunch
Newgrange: As we were coming up the valley, we could see a white wall wrapping a grassy knoll on the top of the hill. It stood out so brilliantly from the surroundings that I shifted for a moment into the past and imagined Neolithic pilgrims coming into view of this marvelous landmark. Newgrange is now named for the farm upon which it resides, but undoubtedly the pilgrims had a much more appropriate name for it. The mound was built before the Egyptian pyramids. It faces south-east. The rising sun on the week of the winter solstice shines levelly into the main chamber through a gap above the door lintel. It was built to be water-tight, and has remained so for well over 5,000 years. We walked around the enormous carved "door-step" stone and entered through a low doorway which had an opening above the top, which the archaeologists call a "sun-box." At first, the passageway was narrow and a bit winding, with big carved rocks (about 5 feet high) on either side. These rocks had spirals and sun-crosses (like medicine wheels) carved into them. Then the passageway opened up, got higher and wider, then we entered a chamber with 3 alcoves off of it. Each alcove had its own style of decoration. Each alcove had a large stone basin in the middle of it, where cremated bones had been found. The chamber's top was a corbelled dome about 20-25 feet high, made of large flat stones overlapped. When I looked up, it reminded me of a wide-open rose, the way the stones overlapped like petals.
After warning us, the grad student who guided us turned out the lights, so we could feel a little of what the ancient people experienced while waiting for the sun to rise on the winter solstice. Blacker than the inside of a cow! (...Long moment...) Then a thin golden glow which brightened. The band of light landed on the floor of the central sacred area. There was a collective sigh from all of us, a sound of awe.
Of course it was done with a light placed in the sun-box. But the amazing thing was that we hadn't realized that we were gradually going uphill as we went into the chamber. The *floor* of the domed chamber is the same height as the sunbox over the doorway.
The whole mound is huge, nearly as big as the gridiron of a foodball field. It is egg-shaped, with the wide part facing south-east. The whole eastern side was covered with white quartz stones about as big 2 or 3 doubled fists. The archeologists dug up as many of the original facing stones as they could find and replaced them, so the mound gleams as far away as you can see it. All around the mound, there are great big curb-stones, as big as the slabs that lined the entrance way to the chamber, about as tall as a person. Many of them are carved with potent symbols -- spirals, sun-crosses, and many other designs with unknown meanings. There are also fire-pits, standing stones and other ceremonial areas around the outside of the mound.
I wondered what the builders would have thought of us wondering and wandering around their temple -- the way it's been restored ( and altered): The crushed stone rectangles around the ceremonial sites, the boxwood hedge, and closely clipped grass lawn. No doubt these folks' genes run in the visitiors, me included.
The monasteries Millefont and Monasterboice are very close, as the crow flies, just on another bend of the Boyne River. This is holy ground for millenia now!
The archaeologists are just finishing up excavating another mound about the same size nearby, which faces the Equinox dawn in a similar fashion. There are over 40 other unexplored mounds in the Boyne river valley which the local farmers have been preserving for millenia, even in the face of the English plantation system. (*chuckle*) They told the English that the fairy folk who lived in those mounds were a nasty bunch, sorta like Ninjas, who would get them, no matter what.
I ended the Newgrange visit separated from the rest of our bus passengers, except for a Japanese man about my age, and we scurried to get back to our group before time for the bus to leave. He was a delightful jogging enthusiast who encouraged me with little English but great communication skills, and we laughed a lot.
Near Newgrange, the driver stopped at a glassblowing-and-cutting shop in a grand stone country house surrounded by pastures with horses, cattle and sheep. The owners/artisans were trained at the famous Waterford glassworks, and, after becoming established, returned to their home county (Co. Meath) to set up this shop. They have a website www.newgrangecrystal.com . One of the designers whose work really impressed me was Paul Costelloe.
Heading out from Newgrange Crystal, Mr. Treacy told us about the latest information on the Irish economy. Unemployment is down from 12% to 4% in the last few years. Inflation was 6.2%/yr last month, up from 5.5%/yr in July. The major shortage is of MDs and nurses; hospitals have imported more than 50 from the Phillipines in the last month. Another labor shortage is hotel and catering workers, which the government is now importing from Newfoundland. High-tech exports are increasing, but not to compare with meat and dairy, which is still the most important by far. {Placing this in perspective, the Republic of Ireland's total population is smaller than that of the Greater Boston area in = Massachusets.)
We lucked out on the way back to Dublin and saw a brilliant double rainbow which lasted a long time. It picked out hill-forts, medieval ruins and modern farmyards as we rollicked along the main road to the big city.
Mr Treacy suggested going to "O'Shea's Merchant" for Irish traditional music and dance. Was he ever right!! Mostly local people & a few European ESL language students. A man from Clare played the fiddle like a lonely angel; a woman sang pure and sweet a capella, and more, much more!! The dancers were regular folks, no costumes, many in their 50s-70s. There were lots of well-behaved kids "absorbing culture." I fell in with a delightful group of dancers and musicians and their relatives, one of whom used the preceding phrase about the kids.