Newgrange, Tara, Bray...

This weekend was cold, wet, blustery and very much turning toward winter. That didn't exactly stop us from doing anything, however...I & some others managed to get out of Dublin on both days. Saturday Cozy, Lee & I woke up early (again) and met a tour bus at the hotel near our apartments. The tour was led by Mary, a chatty & friendly guide, & took us & a bunch of others up to Newgrange, telling us all the while about the history of Ireland, from the Stone Age until now. We wandered the visitor centre for a few minutes, then took the shuttle bus up to the actual site of Newgrange Passage Tomb:




It's a mound covering about an acre, with a small passage leading into a chamber with three recesses off it. Cremated bones were placed in the recesses.



(The entrance.)

If you look above the doorway, the other opening is called the roofbox. On the winter solstice (& the two days before and after it), the rising sun shines in exactly through that opening, down the passage & into the chamber, lighting it all up. They gave us a simulation...we were all standing in the dark of a chamber built half a century before the pyramids--and unchanged since then--when light starts creeping down the passageway, and the room gets slowly bright. It's hard, artificial light, not real golden sunlight, but it's still breathtaking.

And this is what you see when you step outside & look across the valley:



There's some incredible mesolithic (I think) art on some of the stones around the edge of the tomb:



No one knows exactly what they mean; one theory is that it's hallucinogneic art, another that it's astronomical and mathematical symbols. Real answer? No one has a clue.

It was cold, and starting to rain, so we headed back down to the visitor centre to get a cup of tea and finish looking at the museum on the Boyne valley (where all these passage tombs are located).

Then it was back on the bus, driving up toward the Hill of Tara.



This church, and adjoining graveyard, is the entrance to the fenced area at the top of the Hill. We had to climb through a gap in that wall there, since the visitor center closes for the winter, into a graveyard:



And out onto the Hill of Tara:



The hill is where the ancient kings of Ireland used to live, and where the center of it all was before Christianity really took hold of the island. When the celts came to Ireland they split it up into four areas (Ulster, Munster, Leinster and Connaght, I believe), and each of those had a king; those four kings elected a High King, who was crowned at Tara and lived at Tara. Nowadays Tara is mostly just a hill; there are mounds and lumps everywhere that signify archeological potential, best seen from the air. They do have a mound:



The best thing about Tara is something we couldn't do, because it was overcast and rainy and nasty. On a clear day, though, if you stand at the very top of Tara, you can see two thirds of Ireland. Just think about that.

We came down off the hill in search of somewhere dry. There is a coffeeshop and giftshop that we poked about in, but the real treasure was the bookshop next door:



We spent plenty of time there, especially in one corner that was filled with old, old books. I found a copy of the Decameron, and one of the Rubiyat, both old and gorgeous.


Saturday night a bunch of us went out to Ri Ra, a club. I'll see if I can sum it up: Music so loud my ears rang when I got home; really bad music downstairs until we moved up to the upstairs bar, where better, soul, reggae stuff was playing; bald Scottish people (well, one) who don't understand body language (for the record, if I've got my arms crossed, don't look relaxed, am literally leaning at an angle away from you, and refuse to look you in the face, there's a good chance I don't want to be talking to you); fantastic dancing from all my friends, including dance impressions of some of our teachers; a hilarious DJ upstairs who rocked out to all his tunes and looked like a more hippie version of my dentist; French kids dancing on the stairs; singing along; feet hurting & promising never to wear those shoes again; coming home at three.


Today we slept in (so wonderful!). We caught the train to Bray, which is along the coast, south of Dun Laoghaire. It was grey, like yesterday, & it started raining a bit while we were on the train, but we were determined to get to a beach nontheless. When we got into Bray we found the main town, and then sheltered in Molloy's to eat lunch away from the torrential downpour outside.



The rain finally let up a little, and we made our way to the beach, past some lovely old buildings:



I will miss buildings this old when I'm back in the states.

So it was cold, very cold; and wet, and blustery; but there was a beach, and it was gorgeous.





It wasn't unlike beaches back home: rocky, gray, wet. Beautiful.





Kate, Nora, and Charlotte stopping the waves:



And me, running from them:



And we arrived back in Dublin, on Grafton street, just in time for the Christmas lights to be turned on, making Grafton street full of, as they say, cheer: