London II

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It's been two weeks since my last blog. I'm far away from England by now. I should have told you more by now. 

The Globe Today

And I'll tell you now just a little about Shakespeare's famous Globe Theatre. The place it used to stand is indicated by a plaque now. There's a little courtyard with a circular edge to it, but it's cut off part way by apartment buildings. Luckily, an American chap who came to London one day decided that it wasn't right that the only monument to The Bard was a coppery plaque tinged with green, and he went about the process of organising its rebuilding along the edges of the Thames, just a few blocks from where it originally stood. The government was unwilling to give him the money, and so he gathered together donations. The ground around the new Globe is scattered with the names of the donators etched into the pavement. Two of the Pythons made their contributions, but John Clease paid double the amount to ensure that Michael Palin's name would be misspelled "Pallin."

The new Globe, along the Thames

The new Globe has been recreated as much as possible with the ingredients that detective work and imagination dictate would have been used in the 15-1600s for such a building. It certainly looks convincing enough, precisely the building I constructed in my mind from two hundred high school Drama classes and several more English ones. A round building with cream panels between the broad wooden beams of the frame, a thatched roof (the only in London, with added sprinklers for Health and Safety reasons), a hollowed interior with a thrust stage and discovery space and trapdoor in the stage, with galleries and space for the groundlings and the Heavens. They even have live performances. While evening ones may not be traditional, given that in the old days electric lighting wasn't so readily available, it's much more convenient in general, and it does give an opportunity to see the moon rising above.



I saw The Tempest. It was amazing. The set was minimal, little more than some reddened stones around one post and partially over the trapdoor where Caliban emerged. The acting was superb. It was hilarious, bawdy in all the right places, with its serious undertones at moments giving just the right edge of discomfort, and the closing speech - that slightly nostalgic reflexive closing speech - was delivered perfectly. At the ceremony for Miranda and Ferdinand, tiny shreds of tissue paper like petals were dropped. They caught in the air and twisted softly, floating and rising on the current. Some were still falling by the close of the play, when the theater emptied and left only rubbish and the moon.

To pursue my love of the literary, I took a bus out to Hampstead Heath and walked through it in the rain - a peel of thunder struck just as I passed a pond of geese - to the little white house John Keats lived in before he left for Italy as a last bid to throw of the tuberculosis that had taken his mother and his brother. The warmer climate didn't help. He died and was buried in Rome desiring only the words "Here lies One whose Name was Writ in Water" to mark his stone, convinced of his failure in life. He was 25, the same age as I am now.

It was nice to see a place that Keats had lived, and the place where he wrote a lot of his most celebrated poems. Changes have been made since his time. The wall dividing the building into two has been taken down. There's an additional room on the end of the house. The heath has been pushed back, and the houses have crowded in. But the parlour he and Charles Brown shared is still there, with the chairs arranged as in a portrait of Keats, and the smaller room that was most likely Keats is upstairs with a bed and a copy of his death mask in a glass case. There are original objects from the time there, mostly donated - some pictures, a painting by Brown, a grandfather clock that Brown took when he emigrated to New Plymouth in the 'Naki and has probably spent equal portions of its life in New Zealand and England. The clock was broken on the way over, though, and was restored with native New Zealand wood, although the top is still the original.

The following day I left London on a train to Oxford. Oxford is beautiful. I thought London was beautiful, but it was nothing to Oxford. It's small, with old buildings that stand both free and in collusion with its neighbours, a mixture of streets with cobbles and modern surfacing, green trees, a straight canal with boats taking shelter from the rain along its edges. There's a castle, with a large green mound beside the road. The University is in old buildings around the town.

It was necessary to visit the Bodleian Library, which is an incredible building. The only way to see it now as a tourist is to take a tour, where you are shown through a few of the lower rooms before you are led up to the library itself. There is often a small exhibition of some of the Bodleian books, and this I visited before my tour. It was called 'Magical Books,' and was the perfect exhibition for me. There were old magical scripts, a collection of Arthurian works, manuscripts and notes from Tolkien and Lewis and Garner and Pullman, a book from centuries ago that helped to predict the future by means of a wooden cog mechanism in the cover, pictures that Tolkien had sketched, a map of Lyra's Oxford, books of old legends and tales, something like a bestiary with a bright and strange coloured creature with feathers and a mammal's form.

The roof in the first room - they don't let you take
photographs of the most beautiful part

The library itself where the oldest books are kept, beyond the room with the decorated ceiling, and the stern Jacobean room, was incredible. There were books from the beginning of the time of books on shelves, not even behind glass, lining the walls up to the ceiling. Beyond the guard at the desk were medieval beams and decorated ceiling panels, the lighting dim but the room somehow filled with a sense of colour. I wished that I could go beyond the barricade and walk past all those shelves, big heavy things in old wood. Lyra Silvertongue went on to study there, after the conclusion of her trilogy, in a world where the Reformation never happened.

Canoes

Shrunken heads

There are many museums in Oxford. I looked at a couple, briefly, but the best by far was the Pitt Rivers Museum. It is a dim interior with glass cases filled of things and objects, arranged not by time or culture, but by things and objects. Pitt Rivers wanted to demonstrate the evolution of man through what they used, and so all are displayed side by side - a case of bagpipes, of flutes, a collection of nets and ropes, articles of religious worship, figures of the human body, an assortment of the heads of the dead, all carefully gathered from around the world or given in donation and organised as Pitt Rivers had intended. I prefer it to the conventional museum. There seems more imagination and magic lurking at the sides, to be seized and make your mouth hang open in wonder. There are few defined stories. It shows pieces of humanity beside each other, as a whole thing, and you see not only the differences but the similarities that we all have, regardless of the ground we were born on.

I ended my trip to Oxford at the Eagle and Child pub, where the Inklings - Tolkien and Lewis the famous ones of the group - used to meet. I had a chicken pie and a glass of cider and sat in a corner, beside a small map of Narnia, listening to the rest of the patrons in the room realise they were all from America or married to an American. Outside, it was raining.

Jessie joined me for the weekend. There was a music festival call Field Day (which makes me think of Hamilton's rural event of the year every time I hear it) that was featuring a few of her prized musicians that we had tickets for - and to my delight, my other friend decided to join us. Somehow a hostel had not been booked for Jessie and I for the weekend, and London, with a bank holiday and the very same music festival we were going to, was booked out. Luckily, we were able to stay just out of the centre of London with my friend. It was then, as she picked us up from the train and drove us back sometime near midnight, that I saw what can only have been a fox run across the road.

The festival was enjoyable, except for the fact that the English don't seem to be able to not smoke or to read signs telling them not to smoke in the enclosed tents where other people are trying to get oxygen to their lungs. Nevertheless, there was some good music and some delicious churros and free samples of Koppaberg cider. It is the first music festival I've been to. I suppose it's nice that it was in London. We managed to leave and catch the last train just in time from the pretend-24-hour city.

Bat for Lashes playing at Feild Day in Victoria Park

In the morning Jessie and I went back in and wandered around Spitalfeilds. At the recommendation of a friend, we located a little-publicised and rather odd tourist attraction at 18 Folgate Street, Dennis Severs' House. It is a museum of sorts, but again an alternative sort. You knock at the front door, and a rather earnest man emerges and tells you that he will come back for you. He lets you in eventually, laying out briefly some rules and informing you that you will not see the family, but you will hear them, and the rest is yours. You pay, and then you wander through rooms left as though someone who lives there has just stepped out for a moment. There is flour on the bench in the kitchen, eggs just cracked, scones buttered and bitten. There are hairs on the hairbrush in the bedroom; an orange filled with cloves scenting a room; fires gently heating the room; shoes left on the floor with the socks crumpled beside; cobwebs in the top floor and a collapsing ceiling above the bed; bedsheets flung back; Victorian cutouts of children standing on the long stairs up; a cat sitting on the windowsill shying away from your touch and then jumping down and wandering away. Every now and then you can hear conversations in other rooms, a carriage passing on the cobbles in the street below, someone walking on the floor above. It's a series of impressions and moments. It's strange. It doesn't have little cards telling you where things came from or what they are. It's the best house museum I've been to.

And then we sat in the park in the sunshine, which had decided to come out, and then caught the necessary tubes from Liverpool to Kings Cross, and waited to go back to York.

The Largest City in Europe

How do you write a blog post about a week in London? It's a busy place. It's a huge place. There's a lot to do, and I did a lot, but somehow in writing it down it doesn't seem like half as much. I suppose it's because London is so busy and  so big, and you're constantly moving. It's hard to eat in London. I had to force myself to stop for long enough to buy something overpriced from a chain pretend-cafe, and then keep going. I went from a week of walking idyllic open spaces, scattered gently with people and livestock and lonely clouds, to the biggest city Europe.

Floating golden busker with a
long nose

When I got into Kings Cross station on Monday, and had brought the magical Oyster Card that would provide me with transport for two zones on the Underground and on any bus in London, I somehow found my way towards the British Museum with my blue wheeled suitcase. It's surprisingly graceful, that suitcase, with four wheels on the bottom, but I can assure you that all its grace doesn't help much with walking up stairs. When I got to the British Museum, I discovered that my graceful suitcase was too large to be checked into their coat room (lest I should be a harbourer of weapons, though I doubt my pocket knife was their main concern) and so instead I found a little cafe in a park nearby and waited for a friend. She's English, but I met her in New Zealand and it so happened that she'd just returned for two months of her own back home before she'd be going back to New Zealand, and that she was in London at a convenient time for me. I went on my first tube ride. I saw Coventry Garden, a market more than a place for trees, and a big statue and giant TV screens, and a pointy monument, and buildings.

I've often admired architecture, but not in the way many people do. I find it hard to get terribly excited about the outside of buildings simply for the way they look, unless they are also ruined or have plants enhancing their unnatural even-edgedness. But in London, I thought the buildings - not all, just some - were beautiful. They just were. And there's such a mix, such a contrast of the old and the new right beside each other - as Jessie later said to me, you can see the Georgian buildings that started the biggest change the world has known right next to the modern buildings that are a product of it.

It was rush hour when my (second?) cousin finished work. I was to stay with him, who I hadn't seen since we were about 12 years old, probably not too long before his family had moved over to England. We crushed into a tube together with everyone else, standing up and swaying against people, snatching conversation here and there, then disembarked to alight on a bus that quickly filled. He lives with three other chaps behind a green door above a shop. I slept on a bean bag, which was comfier than I had expected.

From a bridge in St James Park

Creepy detail of St Paul's

Lady of the Night, from a society in a time in the world

I looked at Big Ben, the Eye of London, various bridges that cross the Thames river, St Paul's cathedral, streets, buildings, people, cars. I looked at statues - there are many statues, of all kinds of people, some of which have wings. I perused the British Museum and ran short on time, so full and vast is it. I saw a range of human societies across time and the globe reduced to little labelled objects caged in glass. On a sunny afternoon, I rested in the green be-flowered St James Park, admired patterned geese and cursed at wicked grey American squirrels, those interlopers of the natural order. I glanced at Buckingham Palace.

A building.

I visited Westminster Abbey for somewhat of a price, waited in a long line to be admitted, walked down the rows of memorials with Jeremy Irons' voice in my ear, telling me a little more about what I was looking at from a little black box. I saw Darwin's grave, and that of the Unknown Soldier wreathed in poppies, the tombs of Kings and Queens, a memorial to Shakespeare, and Geoffrey Chaucer's tomb. He rests in Poet's Corner now, the first among many famous literary names who are noted even if their bodies lie elsewhere. Chaucer wasn't originally buried where he is now, but in a lesser part of the Westminster grounds. He was afforded the privilege for his work for the government rather than his literary prowess, which grew later and afforded him the more prominent place he now has. Not that anyone notices him that much anymore. In the postcard shop, they had a postcard for Shakespeare who isn't even buried here, but nothing at all for Chaucer. Chaucer. Geoffrey Chaucer. I was outraged. I was enraged. I raged. To friends, and on a blog. Particularly because I mostly obeyed the stupid rule about not taking a photo, and so took a terrible unfocused one on my cell phone and was too chicken and obedient to take another.

Illicit photograph

Inside the Tower, with one raven flying above a tree, and just a sample
of the tourists

I visited the Tower of London for somewhat of a price - sightseeing is expensive in London, positively steep, but the Tower was too beautiful for me not to. It contains, unsurprisingly, a great deal of history, and, in fact, several towers, and still the beefeaters and their families live there - one of them led a large group of us around, and we sat in the chapel as he told us who had been murdered by whom and lay where. There is the Bloody Tower, where they think those nephews of Richard III were murdered. There is the spot where the scaffolding for the executions of royalty was erected. There are towers where prisoners were held, and where they carved their names and surprisingly delicate designs into the sandstone walls. There are museums with weapons and objects, and the gaudy royal jewels that are nothing but gold and shiny rocks that everyone crowded around to gawk at. There are the ravens, whose wings are clipped, some of whom are in cages. There must always be at least six ravens resident at the Tower, for the fortress will fall should they leave.

Squashed image of within the Tower

One gets bored when imprisoned in the Tower

Squashed image (why is it behaving so?) of the Traitor's Gate

At the advice of a friend, I walked down Brick Lane (either near or in Spitalfields, I'm not suite sure which, but I do know I caught the tube to Liverpool then walked). At one end the shops seem standard fare, but as you walk down the concentration of Indian and similar ethnic food shops increases, until it feels as though you've somehow stumbled away from where you thought you were. I didn't note it, but legend (Rob) tells of a mosque that began its life as a Catholic church, then transmogrified to a synagogue before reaching its most recent incarnation.

Brick Lane

It was here I had the best coffee in all of England, if not the United Kingdom. A New Zealand run cafe called Nude has its roastery off Brick Lane, and I found it and partook of the most delightful cappuccino. The extraction was perfect. The milk was frothed exquisitely  The design in the foam was like a fern frond newly unfolded to the delights of the planet. I had one sugar, because I hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch and I felt like something sweet. Perhaps you are thinking, "What? A mere cappuccino when surely a NZ cafe would offer the flat white, which is all but unknown to cafes outside of NZ?" To that I say, poopoo. I like frothy milk sprinkled with chocolate powder.

And what else, what else did I do in London? I'll tell you in my next post, and I promise you, the best is yet to come.

Lake District Part the Second

This post will not be very long. I'm in the Manchester Airport, awaiting a flight above the oceans of the world. I have been very busy in London, and didn't have the chance to post about the rest of my time in the Lakes, and certainly did not have time to post about London and its many, many things. So here, I shall summarise here the last few days in the Lakes.

Windemere

Dove Cottage today

The Lake District wasn't all walking for me. I did visit the Keswick Pencil Museum, which houses the largest pencil known to the human race, and also has a model of a chap mining graphite from the Cumbrian land. I also, of course, visited Grasmere, and paid a visit to the grave of William Wordsworth and, on the other side, to Dove Cottage, the first house he lived in when he moved to Grasmere. Dove Cottage was the place where he wrote many of his famous poems, and where he lived with his wife and sister and children and essentially Coleridge, so often did he visit. It was interesting to see his house, and to think that it was here he lived and composed and made good use of his ego. I'd just like to pause here to give you one of my favourite bits of Wordsworth that I think gives a nice little image of the man and one aspect of Romantic poetry:

What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.

Visiting Wordsworth's grave was oddly emotional for me. I fear I must have been tired, and swear a tear did not escape mine eye. Wordsworth is buried with his family in a churchyard that smells like gingerbread and sits just above the Daffodil Garden in his name. It was already past the best of the daffodil season however, and I saw few of admirable note; neither did I see many along the shores of Ullswater, the lake that legend tells inspired that poem for which Wordsworth is most sadly known. Sure, daffodils are nice and all, but I think that one's been done to death now. It's even on the plastic souvenir bags one gets when one buys far too much Kendal Mint Cake. I've always much preferred a sadder poem, 'A slumber did my spirit seal,' which you may read of your own volition should you so wish here. Or elsewhere, such as, believe it or not, in what they call "books."

It was of course obligatory that I must stay at Windemere, and so I spent two nights there in a nice bed and breakfast and had a little look around. There is a walk one can take up a hill from which the lake in its entirety is visible, as well as much of the surrounding landscape. I had again a cloudy damp day when I did this, but nevertheless I was rather taken with the extent and form of the land and water.

I caught a 50p ferry across the lake and walked in no particular direction, ending up beside farmland, beside the lake, through farmland, and then passing Hilltop, the ill-named house of Beatrix Potter (it was not on a hill; neither was it open) and taking a stroll along Hawkshead. It was a walk, the billboards told me, she had often taken, and a source of inspiration for the little characters that decorated said billboards.

I visited Aira Force (from the Norse fors, for, I believe, water fall). It is a very powerful crashing of water down a hillside, not in one mighty drop, but in several smaller ones that send the water churning and have cut through rock and crash and boil down in small places. At the tallest fall, I stood and was covered with spray as it pounded down. The water was a murky shade from all the rain.

And oh, I must have done other things, like enjoy watching television again, and having a room to myself and most certainly banning all snores, and seeing another red squirrel in Grasmere of which I cannot locate a photograph at this moment. The Lake District was beautiful. I imagine that it still probably is, but I have a plane to catch.

A Lot of Lakes Part the First

When I think of the Lake District, I think of scenery, walking, and the Romatic poets - Wordsworth and Coleridge of course, collaborating together in Grasmere and Keswick, but also their contemporaries and buddies who lived or travelled, like Southey, de Quincey, Shelley, Keats. It was an intense period of change for England, socially, culturally and politically, with the French Revolution having implications for English politics and thought, and the Industrial Revolution changing the way life was lived at a speed unprecedented.

At Buttermere

The Lake District surely was a stark contrast to this. It wasn't without change of its own, which is considered in some of the poetry, but there was still what would have seemed a simpler way of life tied directly to the land - and there was a beautiful landscape of smooth lakes and steep slopes, of green pastures and living forests.

Derwentwater

There are 20 major lakes in the District, with a variety of other tarns and resivours scattered in the dips and flat stretches between the hills. I stayed first at a youth hostel beside Derwentwater, a lake I'd not heard of, but possibly my favourite of those I saw. Barrow House, its other name, is a converted mansion that the Queen visited at some point for a reason. It's a short bus trip or a slightly longer but absolutely gorgeous walk from Keswick, one of the main centres in the national park, and so it is removed from the bustle. The lake is on the other side of the road, and all around is tame woodland, with a waterfall right outside - I could hear it (when the fat chick wasn't snoring) from my bed. I'd been unsure of the location simply because the buses didn't run early or late, but when I turned down Barrow Road out of Keswick all doubts were dispelled. The footpath went alongside the road, beside green fields sprouting lambs, through patches of forest with robins and tits and other light-tongued birds, along the lake shore itself, and unfolding at turns beautiful hills layering themselves like a satisfyingly good metaphor.

Walking from Keswick towards Barrow House/ Derwentwater Youth Hostel

The area is on the border of Scotland, and so it's not surprising that some of the hills are quite similar, particularly on the days when I got low cloud and moments of lingering rain. There were similar forms and rocks, and a few thin waterfalls, but it did feel much tamer. Some of this is surely to do with the level of domestication, with a greater population than many of the areas I passed through in the Highlands, but the fields and paddocks were more deliberately defined on the ground. There were also many more people walking, which was sometimes odd as I would feel as though I had it all to myself for a brief time, only to have a small posse of well-equipped walkers just around the next turn.

I had quite a perfect afternoon the first day, so sunny and warm I had to roll my trousers up. The air was clean. I walked behind the hostel and along the side of a hill, looking out across the lake and its surrounding hills. I saw a black beetle shining in the grass, and a hawk having an argument with another bird. After dinner Derwentwater demanded to be swum in, and cajoled me until on the third try I managed to submerge myself (all but my head) in the rather cold water. The stones were slippery with a rust-coloured layer. The air, though cooling for night, was warm again when I got out and hung my damp gear on a small tree at the water's edge. I sat on a stone for a short while then walked back through midges, hoping to see badgers that never came to me.

I did, however, see a red squirrel the next morning. It skittered through the leaves across my path and up the trunk of a tree, where it sat and then teleported a few feet higher, then sat again. If it had kept where it was to start with, I'd not have known it was there.

In the on-off rain the following day I walked up to Cat Bell summit, a steep fell on the opposite side of the lake. At the top the wind was so strong I crouched to try and keep my balance.I could just see the white of the hostel somewhere on the other side, behind the rain. I finally worked out how to set the self-timer on my camera at the bottom, on the other side of Derwentwater.

Foreboding on the Cat Bells

Lake Buttermere

I found my way around to Keswick and caught a bus to Buttermere, where frantic spells of sun lit up the beautiful hills at the far end. I walked around the lake, woods on one side and farmland on the other, with a river reaching from the hills at its end. It began raining again as I reached the bus stop, and I holed up in the public toilet (don't worry - it won Bronze in the National Toilet Awards and wasn't as bad as it may sound) until the bus arrived. 

A Little Trip to Ireland

As far as I’m concerned, the joys of my Dublin trip began in the Leeds Bradsford Airport, where the cafe was trying to get rid of all their stock and I was able to get a salmon baguette for but one quid. The delicious food experiences were only to continue as the weekend proceeded, and what better time to make note of them than now? If you’re not interested in what I ate, you clearly don’t appreciate food enough.

Birthday cake

The following day we had lunch at an oddly decorated but quite charming cafe where Jessie (who came over for the first two days) and I shared a goat’s cheese tartlet for starters, while she had for mains the day’s soup with the most amazing bread, and I had a Spanish omelette covered in cheese. For our dinner at a fine little restaurant that overlooked the river, and gave us a fine view of a rainbow, I had pork with cubes of black pudding and, to nicely compliment it, grated beetroot; Jessie had perfectly done chicken with roast vegetables in a nice sweet-savoury sauce. Finally, the fare of my birthday – fish and chips on the waterfront (observed by a wicked rook) in a little seaside village called Howth and, at a table for one with a checkered cloth, pizza and tiramisu.

Ooh!

On our arrival, I was somewhat daunted by the size of the hostel we had booked for. It had three levels, all rather full, and the reception area was at the end of a gauntlet of loud celebrating guests. There was a quiet bar across the road, where we had a drink before going to bed. In the morning we took care of important business – a pair of shoes, and a pair of jeans, to replace items of ours that had fallen into severe disrepair. The river made a nice little break in the city, and also showed a divide between newer buildings on one side and older buildings on the other. It was difficult at first to find the green places in the city, but once found it was marvellous, for they were very green indeed where they were meant to be, and in other places full of colour for bulbs and blossoms and blooms. We also discovered a face picked out in the grass.

As in Edinburgh, there were two museums I visited – the National Museum, and the Writer’s Museum, for also like Edinburgh the city has been given special recognition (UNESCO Cities of Literature) as having produced several significant literary figures. Chaps like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde, and a few dames too, have been granted plaques and statues around the city. The Museum gives information about them, but also other writers. There are all kinds of items as you’d expect, but also some portraits displayed in a large and fancy room above the main display rooms. The National Museum had some fantastic displays of ancient treasure hoards, weapons, daily items, and people. There were three bog people, their hides kept quite well in tact over the centuries from their burial in bogs. It’s because of the bogs, too, that many items have been discovered in Ireland. The art gallery too was worthwhile, especially as it clearly marked out the Irish artists – and there were some very nice artworks.

There we go, the Brooch

I was also quite interested in the Garden of Remembrance. I’m used to such memorials for those who have fallen being for World War I and II, with the other wars tacked in on the edges. Here the pool had patterns of shields in it, and the statue was of three figures falling in action. Their clothes were nondescript. Breaking free from the bodies were swans.

The weather on my birthday, when we took a bus out to Howth, was again a little mixed, but mostly it was sunny. Howth is on a peninsula, and we walked the cliffs around some of it. Again, I was struck by the greenness, and the sense of spring. The vanilla scent of gorse was strong in the air, and little birds hid in hedges, teasing us as we passed. We had a fine view of two little islands as we came around the head, one accessible by kayak and, I think, called the Eye of Ireland, and the other privately owned. I wouldn’t mind owning an island in Ireland. I was given a birthday gift there, though, of a triquetra Celtic knot from Scotland. Later, I caught up with an old flatmate.

The final thing I did was perhaps my favourite, because I got to see more green and because I got to see some very old things. I took a tour out into the Boyne Valley to see Newgrange and the Hill of Tara. The Boyne Valley is a very fertile area, with the river Boyne flowing through it, and these are surely among the reasons that it was chosen in ancient times to be the seat of Ireland’s civilisation. Newgrange is one of three large hill-like structures in the valley, along with Knowth and Dowth, considered to be tombs. Large stones were carefully brought in and arranged on top of each other, without the help of technologies such as the wheel, to form dome-like watertight enclosures aligned with important astronomical events. When they were left and fell out of memory, outer walls collapsed, and the grass on top had liberty to spread down the sides on the freed earth. The inside stones, however, mostly stayed as they were.

Newgrange

The entrance to the Tomb, with the carved entrance stone
at the front, and the roof box visible above

Newgrange is the tomb that can be entered. It has been reconstructed on the outside, to put the fallen stones back in their perceived places, but the inside has not been touched – except by graffiti artists a few centuries ago, when the tomb was rediscovered but hadn’t yet been protected. I spotted my own initials carved into the rock. These days you would probably be shot if you tried to do something like that. Visits are very restricted, and rightly so. People brushing against the thin stone passage as they pass through begin to wear them away, along with the beautiful geometrical carvings made by the ancients. We were led in in a small group, but it was a tight squeeze when we got to the centre. I could clearly see the structure of the stones, with the cap on the top. There were three little alcoves (do you use this word? Alcoves?) that held large bowl-like stones. There are many theories as to what they were for, including a resting place for the dead. It’s the alignment of the ‘roof box’ that people tend to know of the most, for at the equinox the sun aligns perfectly with a little gap above the entrance way with its marvellous carved stone beneath, and a long thread of light stretches down the passageway, penetrating the darkness for just a short few minutes before departing. This was simulated with a light bulb, pale surely in comparison to the sun, but quite incredible. With the lights switched off, it is very dark inside, and the line of light could easily be a passage for the spirits of the dead to travel out of this forsaken world.

Detail on another stone around the edge of the monument

Some bumps on the Hill of Tara

Our second stop, after passing by a castle before which many stars (including Springsteen) have played and in which they have then stayed, and driving past beautiful shades of growth on the hills, was Tara. Because of the rain, we were ushered to a little second hand book store run by an elderly chap by the name of Michael Slavin, who’s written books about the area. He gave us a short talk about the hill and showed us some slides. We then went out to look at the hill. It was so very green, a kind of shade I can’t quite think of without being overwhelmed. Tara was, perhaps, the proper seat of the kingdom, where druids felt something important in the ground and the air. The hill has been shaped in dips and rises, in circles. Items have been found here – items I saw in the museum, including the Tara Brooch that came from nearby (and was the emblem for my high school).  There’s a church built on the site of an ancient church. A little further down the well is a sacred well, turned holy when Christianity came.

A rook, and lots of gorgeous green

Sacred water, or holy well?

I left my red hair tie on the fairy tree on the Hill of Tara, along with a thousand other ribbons and rags. Sadly, the Stone of Destiny, that’s said to roar when the true monarch touches it, didn’t roar for me.