April 26, 2005 - Cashel

Our first stop after breakfast was to visit the ruins atop the Rock of Cashel. It was a glorious morning with a bright blue sky and puffy clouds, and the ruined cathedral soared majestically above a huge outcrop of native stone. We started our tour watching a 20-minute video on the history of the site and also took a guided tour a bit later, and I would highly recommend both activities if you ever get there.

The movie covered the long and involved history of the site fairly well, as far as we could tell. The Rock of Cashel was the site for early Irish High Kings, who fought each other over the centuries. Since much of the original fortifications would have been wooden palisades and such like, nothing remains of them. However, this site is apparently where Saint Patrick converted the Irish High Kind and thus turned Ireland to Christianity; a very old stone cross, reputedly from that time, was in the small museum next to the entrance. The first stone structure on the rock was a 28-meter high, graceful round tower built by O'Brien, one of the last Irish kings.

O'Brien gave the site over to ecclesiastical use in 1134, however, and it remained dedicated to religious uses for the ensuing centuries. Cormac McCarthy, King of Desmond, first built a small but beautiful Romanesque church from sandstone on the site. Preserved in the lee of the larger, later cathedral, Cormac's church had a graceful and interesting interior. I enjoyed the carved faces adorning the main archway into the chancel and the frescoes on some of the walls inside. Some of the faces had eroded over time, of course, but several were still intact and remarkably lifelike.

The main cathedral was built in the 1200s after the Anglo-Normans took power in this part of Ireland. The style had shifted to more Gothic than Roman, and the high tapering windows must have looked beautiful when fitted with the original stained glass. None of that remained, but the soaring, vaulted architecture of the windows and the bell tower in the center of the church were still very impressive.

The cathedral suffered through natural catastrophes like the Black Death in the 1300s and human catastrophes like being stormed by the Protestant forces during Elizabethan times. Inchiquin in 1647 was razing the local countryside and 3,000 of the local folks had taken shelter in the church. However, he burned the church and slaughtered every man, woman, and child in it. Reports of the time said that the entire floor of the cathedral was covered with a continuous layer of corpses. That is, by the way, a rather gruesome picture to have in your mind as you walk through a church and I, for one, could not get it out of my mind. Curiously enough, atrocities by the English occupation forces continued right through the Irish revolt of 1919 to 1922. In reprisal for some military act by the IRA, the British forces stormed into a soccer match and opened fire on the crowd of spectators, once again killing innocent men, women, and children. The more I learned about the centuries of suppression of the Irish by the English, the more I understood the residual hostility that still popped up here and there.

The cathedral was finally abandoned and left to its fate until the Irish government took it over in the mid 1900s. They restored the Vicar's Choral building, which contained the entrance gate, the audio-visual center, and a tiny room of exhibits, and stabilized the rest of the ruins as best they could.

The restored area of the choral building had a very nice wood truss roof constructed solely with wooden dowels, and a 1600s Flemish tapestry that was wonderfully complete and detailed. That tapestry looked impressive to me even after 4 centuries of fading colors, and I dearly wondered what it would have looked like when first woven. Were the colors then as vivid as a color photograph today?

The young woman giving our tour truly had the Irish gift of gab. Besides the history of the cathedral and outbuildings, she regaled us with fanciful stories associated with the site. We enjoyed the story of Bishop Miler Magrath who flip-flopped from Catholic to Protestant as necessary to keep power, married at least once (maybe during his Protestant years?), had 9 children, lived to be 100, and wrote poems eulogizing himself. If we didn't already have the perfect word "chutzpah" for such behavior, maybe we could call it "Magrathing"! The final coda to this unusual life was that Bishop Magrath had a burial place set up in the chancel area but no remains were ever found there and to this day no one knows where the bishop really lies.

Our second stop of the day was at the base of the rock where we visited the local Heritage Center. We explored each of the options in the small underground exhibit area to get our money's worth from our visit and learned that poets and musicians were in the top ranks of society in the old Celtic culture. I had to wonder to what extent the cultural emphasis on humor that I observed in contemporary Irish culture could also be a cultural inheritance from the Celts. How far back can you trace "Limericks" or other comic poetry, anyhow?

Some things, however, had clearly shifted even during the dominance of the Celts. I was surprised to learn that the harp supplanted the initially dominant Irish bagpipes for court music. It reminded me of the succession of early Greek musical instruments by later, more modern types of instruments, and I would give a pretty penny to really understand and be able to predict big cultural shifts in values and preferences like that.

Hunger finally drove us out of the Heritage Center, but not before I bought some books of Irish songs with accompanying CDs that I had been searching for all over Ireland. Monika bought a "worry monk"-a glob of glass roughly shaped like a monk's face that could be used like a worry stone. We had a really good lunch at Grandma's Place across the street (Grandma's picture is above the door back into the kitchen), and then headed northwest.

En route we stopped off at Holy Cross Abbey, a 12th Century church which reputedly had a fragment of the real cross. More importantly, the abbey has been restored with state and local funds to essentially its original condition, and that gave us an unparalleled opportunity to see what all the ruined cathedrals we had seen might have really looked like right after they were built. The high gothic arches gave plenty of light from the windows and the whitewashed walls reflected the light so well that the interior appearance was bright and clean, which is not an impression you get from looking at the ruins or the old, dirty cathedrals that I have found in other parts of Europe.

The two things that struck an anachronistic note were the modern versions of stained glass windows and the pews in the nave. The modern stained glass was composed of abstract forms, and I really felt that they should have recreated the type of leaded glass windows that I have seen on other old cathedrals-modern abstract art in a gothic cathedral felt like an aesthetic slap in the face. Back in the 12th Century there were no pews, of course, but since this is a functioning church and modern parishioners need their creature comforts, I could understand that departure from authenticity. In any case, if I imagined the pews gone and the stained glass in a more traditional pattern, the picture of how Irish churches and cathedrals probably looked after being built in the 1200s was surprisingly cheerful.

Continuing to the northwest we finally fetched up for the night at "Dancer's Cottage" a B&B run by a German couple and furnished entirely with antiques, as far as I could tell. Antiques and I don't get along too well; I was afraid to touch or sit on anything because it all looked so old, rickety, and valuable. After a drive over to Terryglass for dinner, Monika took some pictures of an old ABC ("Another Bloody Castle") just down the road from our B&B and we retired to our rooms for the night.