Welcome back. I hope you’re having a nice weekend before we all go in for another round tomorrow.
While in Killarney we didn’t actually visit Killarney House, but went to Muckross House instead, since that was just 5km from our campsite, so we went there on foot, visiting Muckross Abbey on our way.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
A beautiful hike past the lake.
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Muckross Abbey is a very pretty ruin, but the graveyard has been in use since at least the 2000s.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
That one looked amazing. I’m sure there’s a message in the tree long surviving the religious building.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Welcome to Muckross House. Our plush of the day is Opossible, who enjoyed his trip a lot.
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“Ireland was a poor country” my ass…
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According to legend, Lady Catherine died at 140 when she fell out of an apple tree. Life goals!
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The gardens were truly beautiful.
Muckross Farm is an open air museum depicting rural life in Ireland in the 1950s. Yes, you read that right. Apart from trades like the blacksmith they have three farmhouses showing a poor family farm, a middle class family farm and a well off family farm. Remember that nice room in the picture above? In the 1950s people in rural Ireland lived like they hadn’t lived on the continent for at least 50 years. no running water, no electricity. Good old medieval “1 room for sleeping, 1 room for living and sleeping” conditions. But the animals were very cute.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
This year I did something new: I shamelessly took selfies and asked people to take pics of me. Am I young and pretty? No. Am I alive? Yes. the person with the camera rarely ends up in pics themself, but I realised that if I died tomorrow, my family would probably forget what I look like in a week because there’s no pics. Here they are. That horse was amazing.
The greenery is lush one the second picture.
ice Swimmer Ireland is a very very green country, because it rains a lot!
Some smashing photos there, the flower (moon flower?) looks like a painting and the tree in the cloister picture is wonderful too, I love the twist on the trunk. And yeah the wealth disprarity was shocking, when I first visited in the late seventies we ended up stopping for a cup of tea at a house that still had no electricity, a peat fed range for cooking and heat with oil lamps for light, a little larger than two rooms, but not by much, we bought some soda bread from the cook which was fantastic. There did seem to be a lot of “teas” signs and you could always find someone wiling to sell you a round of bread.
And having photos of you is good Giliell, it really does help as forgetting you deceased beloved’s face is definitely thing, and a distressing thing too. However I hope they will have decade more photos to sort through before we come to that!
I absolutely love the tree in the abbey courtyard. Do you know perchance what tree it is? I would guess it is a sycamore maple, they can grow into magnificent sizes. Although they do not tend to live too long, a couple of centuries at most.
@Charly I’m sorry, I have no idea
@Jazzlet
I love soda bread. Best served fresh with some nice seafood chowder.
Charly I wondered if it was a hornbeam, IIRC they have a distinct sprial to the trunk, and given the sheltered position it’s not wind twist.
@Giliell, I understand, not everyone is obsessing over trees since their teens like me :-).
@Jazzlet, sycamores often have spiral trunks too, especially if they reach high age. Many large trees do have this spiral, It is in part due to the wood collapsing under the crown’s weight. A hornbeam of this size would be impressive, but it turns out, it is not hornbeam either.
It is not a deciduous tree at all. It did not occur to me that the tree would be remarkable enough to be googleable so I did not try at first, but it is. And when I googled it, it turns out it is a yew and it is probably over 400 years old. Yews are slow-growing and a yew of this size is really impressive. Yews are also very rot and pest resistant and can live for thousands of years so that tree might still have a long future before it as the buildings surrounding it continue to decay and collapse.
and after “The Collapse” (TM), people can go back to making bows out of yew.
Thank you Charly!