Musings

Today’s tale begins with giant Neolithic passage tombs, that is soil and stone burial mounds. First, we went to Knowth, then Newgrange. Both are part of the ritual landscape we call Brú na Bóinne, as it’s along the Boyne River. The landscape as currently mapped is 2000 acres and some 40 passage tombs. We visited the two largest only, and nobody really addressed the rest (some discussion in the visitor centre displays). We went by bus on timed, guided tours (hustle, hustle), first to one, then the other. We got to stand in a modern room inside the periphery of Knowth, and to go through the passage into the central room in Newgrange (wow!). No photos in the latter.

Here’s Knowth being excavated. The central tumulus is huge, and it has many satellite mounds. Two of the small ones were constructed before the big one. The first part of the big one was built was the middle of the interior, and the passage.

Here’s our tour group strolling among the little satellite mounds; you get an idea of the scale. The upright stones (and many other building materials) came from some distance away; this civic-ceremonial architecture was wanted.

We had an opportunity to scramble down into a souterrain, so of course I did. It’s an underground passage that was used to store food and to hide from invaders. They are much later than the Neolithic. And dusty. That’s because the weather is sunny (and breezy), and coming from Europe. When the wind comes from the west: blustery and rainy. We have fingers crossed that the sun continues. We are so lucky.

We had an opportunity to see in the passage at Knowth. It’s a very long ways to the center of the mound!

Around the outside of the mounds are stones with a face outward that was carved/pecked, I think every one, although not all are in good enough shape to see the designs. Here’s a sinuous line, with other figures. The “roof” above the stone is modern protection. When the mound was in use, it was in the weather.

This is Newgrange. If Knowth was huge, this mound is gigantic. It had architecture around it, but not the cluster of smaller mounds Knowth had. The pecked designs in the rocks are similar to those at Knowth but the proportions of types are different.

This is the entry to the Newgrange passage. It looks like there’s a bar across it horizontally. There are actually two passages. The lower one is the one people used; the upper one is for the sunlight at dawn for about six days at the winter solstice in December. They faked it for us—very impressive.

The white stone with cobble facade is for real. It is old and the quartz stones came from the Wicklow Mountains some distance away. The black stones are part of a modern remodel they did to permit visitors to enter the passage. The black stones are machine-cut so no one will make any mistakes about their antiquity. The giant stone that is sideways across the entrance was found there; it was put in place before the mound was constructed, as were the stones lining the passage, roofing the passage and interior spaces, etc. This building took generations to finish?

There’s a model of the interior of Newgrange in the visitor center, where you are allowed to take photos. This is the ceiling. It’s a high space, much less confining than you’d expect. The passage, however, is narrow, and the floor slopes up as you walk, waddle, or crawl in.

Okay, enough with the ancient ancient. This is the cemetery at Monasterboice, originally a monastery founded in the early 6th C. I’m not sure of the date of the round tower, but the two churches that are here (small) date to the 14th C. Monastery operations moved to nearby Mellifont in the mid-1100s.

The grounds of Monasterboice are known for the three high crosses here. High crosses are huge, very outsized, which makes for a large canvas for bible stories. The tops tend to look like a little building, or a reliquary.

And here’re the remaining walls of the magnificent octagonal lavabo at the Mellifont abbey complex. The building was for the monks to ritually wash their hands. We are told.

On to another abbey ruin. This is Slane, on the Hill of Slane. And whatta hill! We saw this sign at Monasterboice and Mellifont, too. And this one and Mellfont had a nice pile of freshly broken auto glass. We are nervous. And nothing is visible when we leave the car. Except, I noticed, a banana.

Here is a corner of the main building. Such views the occupants had! Same as the Neolithic people at Knowth and Newgrange.

And now we and our little red VW (takes unleaded not diesel) are ensconced in B&B number one, just outside Kells. The Kells with the name attached to the illuminated manuscript we debated visiting, but didn’t. Probably it was not made by monks from Kells, however.

Posted at 3:53 PM | 2 Comments »

Of course, what I noticed first were the plants growing in the wall-cracks. Next I noticed the pierced spheres. I don’t know what they represent. They’re in a line following the pediment arch and also on the “points” of the Corinthian column details.

This street is perpendicular to O’Connell, and the tram right-of-way is functioning here. Such a contrast to the upheaval on O’Connell.

First stop: the National Museum of Ireland—Archaeology. Here’s a reconstructed bogman with his fancy hairdo. The poor fellow (gruesome death) was found during mechanized peat harvesting, and was about 25 yrs old. He’s called Clonycavan Man (Early Iron Age, 392–201 BC).

Mr. Clonycavan’s hairdo is fascinating. The zone along the hairline were cut short, and the rest of the hair was long and twisted and affixed to the top of his head. It was held in place with a substance that included pine resin and plant oil; the resin could not have come from Ireland, and instead came from the Iberian Peninsula or what is now France. We know from other exotic items that there was trade during this era along the western European Atlantic façade, so this is not entirely unexpected. After all, cosmetics frequently incorporate rare and foreign materials (think ambergris and frankincense).

Contrast reconstructed Mr. Clonycavan with this stone face, dated to the 1st or 2nd C AD. The stone has three faces, carved so evenly spaced that if you eye one face dead on, you can’t tell the other two faces are there (you can see a hint of another face on the left margin because I viewed this one slightly obliquely). This is the only face with the hole between the lips. The label gave scant information, and nothing about the context of the triple-face-stone.

Jumping forward again in time, this is a close-up of the medieval Cong Cross. It was made to house a piece of the true cross acquired in 1122 by Toirrdelbach Ua Conchobair (1088–1156), who had unified Ireland (or most of the people of the island, and at least nominally), in ~1120. The cross is of oak wood covered with sheets of brass, and overlaid with elaborate filagree decorations and set with cast brass and enamel hemispherical bosses. At the enter of the cross is a rock crystal, and the piece of the cross was set behind it, so that I suspect it acted in part as a magnifying glass, but also obviously as protection. The filagree is in what is called the Scandinavian Late Urnes style, very curvy and ornate, and requiring considerable craftsmanship to create. The cross was made to be socketed onto a pole and used as a processional cross. The cross was first installed at the church at Tuam, then moved to nearby Cong Abbey.

Both the wood-fragment and the cross symbolized the piety and legitimacy of the king, and united the civic-ceremonial realms. Often, one or more brothers or sons of such kings were priests, further controlling the two spheres of leadership. If Cong seems a strange word for Irish, it’s a corruption of Cúnga, referring to the narrowing of the river at this location—the abbey was actually built on a small island, with constricted river-courses flanking it.

Leaving the museum, we moseyed on through a casual shopping arcade, with all manner of items available from informal booths. Zero purchases.

We spotted this memorial to the 1916 Easter Rising, a particularly bloody week in the violence that ultimately lead to Irish Independence, which achieved constitutional legitimacy in 1922. It opened on the centenary of the Easter Rising, in 2016. The central blue face is that of James Connolly, who had the press and newsprint that was used to print the Proclamation of the Republic, which was a trigger event for the Rising. We saw an original yesterday at the Print Museum, very yellowed as it was light-weight acidic paper; only 30 are known to have survived of the 1000 printed.

This is the last rise to the east gate into Dublin Castle; the area is called the Lower Castle Yard. Castles are built on prominences (either natural or artificially enhanced, doncha know.) The round tower is the last of the medieval towers to survive, not only of the castle, but in all of Dublin. The medieval castle had four substantial corner towers (this is one), a pair of smaller towers flanking the north gate, the only entrance, and a single smaller tower opposite the gate.

Flanking this building are two present gates to the castle courtyard (Upper Yard; foreground). The one on the right, now shrouded to contain construction debris and mask the workers, is often seen in movies, etc., and is the principal ceremonial entrance. A female figure holding a pair of scales surmounts it. The clock-tower building is called Bedford Tower and dates to the 1750s, along with all the Georgian-style buildings facing the yard. In this yard, the English soldiers marched and paraded, as this was this was the seat of English administration of Ireland.

During the Rising and in the years that followed, this was the citadel of the British military in Ireland and the residence of the British viceroy/chief governor. In Jan 1922, the British leader, Lord FitzAlan, the Lord Lieutenant, accepted a signed copy of the Anglo-Irish Treaty from Michael Collins, a key negotiator and dominant leader of the Irish movement, and leader of the Provisional Government. The Lord Lieutenant then declared that the Provisional Government was in control, the castle was surrendered, and that the final steps in the transfer of power would follow. This made Collins effectively Prime Minister. The story goes that when Collins arrived and stepped out of his car, the Lord Lieutenant noted that he was seven minutes late. We are told that Collins replied, “We’ve been waiting over seven hundred years, you can have the seven minutes.”

Just NNE of the gate, and below, is the Dublin City Hall; here’s the interior of the rotunda. I could see its curves on the outside, so of course I had to check it out. Unlike the library reading room, this was empty of people except for two tourists resting their feet by sitting in folding chairs standing encircling the base of the rotunda.

The building was built over the decade from 1769 to 1779. The architect originally intended the central skylight to be open, as it is in the Pantheon, but: Ireland/rain. The building was then the Royal Exchange, functioning essentially as a marketplace for businessman making transactions—for the exchange of paper and not goods. Dublin’s city government bought the building and remodeled to be the city hall in the early 1850s.

Irish rebels (from the British point of view) held this building during the Easter Rising, so were extremely close to the British citadel; most of the building’s occupants were female clerical workers subjected to a 12-hour siege by British troops.

I took this picture of the “no sitting” spikes because they were so…uncompromising. This attracted the attention of this café-ista duo.

BTW, don’t count on any more double-posts like I did yesterday. Anyway, this one is wordy enough for two….

Posted at 2:58 PM | Comments Off on Of artifacts and independence

The other week I found this penny, just call me Old Sharpe Eyes, OSE for short. I cannot figure out how on edge got crushed like this, to an abruptly feathered edge.

Posted at 11:05 PM | Comments Off on Not a farthing

We began the morning in a fog. Real fog. We took care of the coffee-fog with the usual medicinal application!

At our first stop, we went back in time to the Mississippian world, which must have been rich in symbolic imagery, stories of other-worlds, and so on—enough to make you shiver. Archaeologists and art historians call this critter the horned serpent, and also use uktena, which is/is from a Cherokee word.

Next stop was in Selma, the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We didn’t walk across, only part way; however, we drove across three times We also looped by the Brown Chapel AME Church, which is where the SCLC met, and where the three marches in 1965 that headed from Selma to Montgomery began.

Posted at 10:08 PM | Comments Off on Considerations

For a time, tall, blocky, stone tower-houses were the rage in Ireland. Perhaps 2K survive today, and thousands more are rubble or gone. Since they took considerable labor, they must have been valued.

I read an article about them today, describing murder-holes and machicolations, which are design details that were all about defense. The author also described a battering-ram test his squad(?) did, which took minutes to take down the door. His conclusion was that tower-houses looked far more defensive than they actually were.

I think they were about elevation—about keeping a lookout. And perhaps visual communication (flags? smoke?) among the many towers, as they were often built close enough to see one from another.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Of murder-holes and machicolations

Turns out that this kind of safety glass is, terminologically, really toughened glass, which I know as tempered glass. Sounds like the toughening process resembles the quenching/tempering of metal.

Following a WikiPee rabbit hole I discovered lead me to Prince Rupert’s Drops. Strange thing: drip droplets of molten glass into cold water; recover when cool. They will have an elongated teardrop shape. Try to crush the bulb; it will be hugely resistant. Snap, break, or crush the skinny tail, and the whole thing will fragment into dust. So I have read. Apparently the tail and the outside of the drop cool faster than the inside, which stays molten a bit longer, yielding a tensile stress pattern that makes the tail weak and the bulb strong. Or something like that.

Anyway, I think this is auto window-glass, fragmented into cuboidal shards.

My other research adventure today had to do with the royal sites of Ireland…medieval period…there are four of them. Five. Six. Depends on the definition.

Wait. One more research adventure: KW taught me what a zarf is. I told JCB, and he said nooooooo…then looked it up. From a Turkish term, he says.

I am now more learn ed, that is learned pronounced with two syllables.

Posted at 11:07 PM | Comments Off on Research adventure(s)

I’m being barraged by Henry VIII of England. First Wolf Hall. Tonight it’s Lucy Worsley’s version….

Yeah, I know Henry’s symbol was the rose not the pansy. My wee joke. Plus, pansies are blooming now and roses aren’t.

Posted at 11:47 PM | Comments Off on Haunted maybe?

We headed down by the river, the Missouri—that seems like it should be the Mississippi to me when you look at the size of the catchment…. That’s it off to the right. Look at that broad floodplain past the channel….

And next to the river, in an unusual bluff, a cave—or a kinda-cave—carved by nature in soft stone, perfect for carving by humans, too. The few petroglyphs the native peoples left are eclipsed by dozens of carvings added in the recent past—including this summer, I daresay. [Apologies for the grotty color; I tried to correct it, no luck—not my specialty.]

We wound up in Grand Island’s downtown (the real, old downtown, and not the highway strips and mall area), where everyone was gearing up for Main Street Xmas (or something like that). Love the fingernail-moon witnessing.

Posted at 7:34 PM | 1 Comment »

Look at that ringfort density! That line is 2 miles long. These people were pretty close neighbors (dispersed homesteads); you could go next door for a cuppa…something, not sugar or coffee. Some of the greater distances are across creeks/marshier areas. Crannogs are artificial islands—very defensible housing locales. See how small many fields are today?…a legacy of thousands of years of chopping up control of the landscape.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

These are two outbuildings in Blaney Park. This alley is mostly ghost town, but some of the buildings on the main road remain in use. Blakey was quite the resort in its day, with a landing strip and swimming lake, golf course and dance hall. Now, the dance hall is mostly closed, almost no one swims in the lake, and the others are…archaeological.

Then I went industrial, and saw this hanger, larger than its denizens.

We ended the day at a loverly restaurant, all very yummy—beet salad! whitefish salad!—and more…. Even better was the company, of course.

Posted at 9:58 PM | 1 Comment »