Passage Tombs, Castles, WOOFers, the Sea, and Tattoos…everything you need to get to Galway

Em and I said goodbye to Dublin and took our Nissan Micro (which the rental guy called large when its seemingly tiny trunk actually swallowed both of our backpacks and Em’s camera bag) and hit the road. We had three days to meander to Galway, where we were to meet our cousin Eli on the 19^th.

First stop on the trip was to Brú na Bóinne, the largest and one of the most important Megalithic complexes in Europe. Brú na Bóinne is a series of mounds, passage tombs, standing stones, hedges, and other Neolithic age enclosures dating back to 3,500 BC. This makes it one of the oldest monuments in the world (it is 500 years older than Stonehenge and a few thousand years older than the pyramids of Gaza). The area comprised of three different sites, Knowth, Dowth, and Newgrange that are spread out around and area of 780 hectares. Other more modern societies later built on top of the site, creating their own distinct additions.

The passage tombs are named because they’re mounds that have walkways into the centers, where there are dolmens (five standing stones with a cap stone on top) that denote burials. All of the sites have at least one tomb that is associated with solar movements and astrology. It’s pretty neat the parallels between these sites and certain ones in America (the Woodland cultures of the Southeast and the Ancestral Puebloans of the Southwest, for instance).  

To round out this day, we left the tombs and headed up the center of the country to Trim Castle and then on to Cavan. Trim Castle is a Normal castle that was built by Huge de Lacy. De Lacy was granted the entire Meath area by King Henry II of England to lord over and built Trim Castle to be his administrative center and home. The Castle was actually built twice as the first time it was built in wood which was easy enough for dissidents to burn down. De Lacy learned from his mistakes and built the second incarnation in stone.

The castle is famous in modern times due to Mel Gibson’s Bravehart. Administrators of the castle sought out Gibson when they found out that he was making his film in the country and enticed him to use the grounds for the film with an offer of “free”. Through Hollywood magic, Trim became four different locations in the finally cut of the film. There is a piece of a prop from the set still at the castle that you can touch if you’re so inclined.

For the evening we stayed in a hostel in Arvagh that was really a family home that had been converted into a hostel. The family that ran the hostel lived in the smaller of two buildings on a small farm and rented bunks to those that managed to either wander a little off the beaten path or those that found them through internet sites and didn’t realize they were kind of in the middle of no where. They were very friendly though and I got a lesson on the difference between Irish soccer, football, and hurling from the nine year old son (none of these are the same as their counter-parts in other countries).

Em and I were the only hostelers staying the night, but there were some WOOFers (Workers on Organic Farms) there that we made friends with. WOOFers are people that flirt from farm to farm working for room and board. Apparently it is an easy and cheap way to travel and meet new people. We meet a pair of brothers, Ben and Joe, from Virginia that had spent their last three summers WOOFing, camping, bike riding, and hitchhiking around Europe. Sounds pretty cool.

With some directions to a few neat places to check out, we headed out the next morning in hopes of finally ending up on the west coast in Bundoran. The first stop for the day was to visit a Dolmen in Arvaghcliff, the next town over from the hostel. The brothers told us to park on the road and head down the path past the cows and the horses and on to what appeared to be someone’s private land. This led us to believe we’d be walking for a few miles. Turns out it was about 400 meters through a meadow. We took some pictures and then headed back on the road.

Next stop was Boyle Abbey, the first successful foundation in Connacht of the Cistercian order. There was some amazing stone work and carved motifs in the ruins of this old monastery, which dates back to the 12^th century. We explored and moved on.

Parke’s Castle, on the edge of Logh Gill, was a large manor house that was built by Roger Parke in 1610 on the top of an earlier O’Rourke’s Castle. Parke essentially tore down the remains of the castle that was there and rebuilt it into his own giant house.

There was time in our day to visit one last site, Carrowmore. This is a region of about one square kilometer with over a 70 passage tombs that were built over a 500 year period. Some of these tombs pre-date even the ones that are at Brú na Bóinne. They are from the same society, just believed to possibly be the precursors to the large ones seen in some of the surrounding areas. Like at Brú na Bóinne, there are aspects of astronomy woven in to the buildings. It was a beautiful graveyard.

Our home for the next two evenings was the TurfNSurf hostel in Bundoran. Bundoran is a small seaside town were our hostel sat on top of the hill overlooking the ocean a block away. You couldn’t really ask for a better view to wake up to and stare at while eating breakfast. Bundoran turned into our favorite city of the country (of from what we’ve visited so far). It was so quaint and had such a feeling of serenity to it, that we instantly loved it. In addition to being right on the water, there was a great seaside cliff trail that you could walk across, a neat old hotel that used to be an old train station and had a great golf course, an amusement park that closed at 11 pm but still let you wander through the darkened rides (Em loved this for taking photos), and a plethora of tasty restaurants to choose from. There was also a B&B that we passed where you could see an array of creepy dolls all staring in towards where guests would be enjoying their breakfasts. It was so creepy that I tried to convince Em that we had to stay there for an evening. She ran away declaring that that was never going to happen.

Our goal of staying in Bundoran was to actually take off north and visit Donegal in the northern part of Ireland (still in the Republic of Ireland though) and see that area. We did head that way, but a chance occurrence of Em biting her tongue ring in half and needing a new one, necessitated a stop at a tattoo and piercing place as soon as we arrived. This in turn led to talking to the proprietor, Ruth Zombie, and taking a look at her work. This all culminated in the acquisition of a new piece of permanent art for both Em and I. I got a Steampunk fairy (something I’d been wanting for a few years) on my shoulder and Em got a dark, gnarled tree with crows and a tree spirit (she named him “Glow”) that the three of us kind of created on the spot from ideas that she had floating around in her head.

To make sure that we got some history in with our “art appreciation”, we also visited Donegal Castle while up north. The castle built by the patriarch of the O’Donnell clan in 1474 but granted to English Captain, Basil Brooke, by the King of England in 1611. Like many of the castles and large manor houses in the UK during this time, the King took lands from their owners and granted them to English lords as rewards and as ways to weaken the cultures of the people in the countries England hoped to subjugate. The castle eventually ended in a ruin, which was resurrected by the Office of Public Works in the late 20^th century and opened as a tourist site.

And here ends the quick and dirty rundown of these few days.