The road greeted us fairly early today. Though not as early as tomorrow’s road will.
We drove to the west of Ireland. A castle beckoned me. When we finally arrived I opened the car before David even stopped. Graniele/Grannia/Grainnelle Ni Mhaille’s door was locked to us. I know the Queen would not have been pleased by this, not at all. She prided herself on the graciousness of the Irish. Did she not kidnap a Howth heir when they rudely refused to accommodate her? Yeah, yeah, yeah-she did. I believe the Queen will be displeased at the present day Irish attorney who has forbidden entrance and accommodation to her guests.
So we left after absorbing her presence.
Croagh St. Patrick awaited us next. The mountain rises above Clew Bay and sits high amongst the clouds. It is beautiful. There were too many of us needing to see too many different things to be able to climb it again today. We all went up to the holy man’s statue. David and I went a bit further. Like David said, it has been 3 years since we climbed it but it felt like we had been there yesterday when we walked the path. It beckoned us to climb again today. We did not want to be selfish so we did not. But the desire to do so is still there. If anyone ever has a chance to climb Croagh Patrick, I highly recommend it. You will remember it always.
Then off to a Grannia/Graniel/Grannielle “center”. It was ‘nice’. It has some nice information for those who wanted to learn about her. And a short video you could watch. The ‘center’ also has a room dedicated to the famine history. The famine memorial had some touching information, terribly sad information, and terribly disturbing information. One plaque quoted the storage on one of the coffin ships to America that the British funded to send the Irish to America or Canada (to get them out of their own country). There were hundreds of starving and soon dying Irish above. And below? Enough food to feed them all.
There is so much to see here that I can not imagine having enough time to explore it all. Short of living here, being independently wealthy and having scholars in history and archeology be your tour guides, there is no way to see it all.
But I am going to give it a good try.
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