Tynanwoods Day Twenty One

November 4, 2006
Day 21: Bog butter on toast; get thee to a nunnery

Today we planned to get an early start out of Dublin, hauling our four duffels, four backpacks, two bags of food, three satchels of dirty laundry, and four tired carcasses into the Opel Astra and head back to Ennis. And we would have if the car had started. It was dead in the underground garage six blocks away, where it had been sitting since we first arrived in Dublin a week previous. Apparently someone in our party left an interior light on; we're still awaiting forensics from the CSI team to determine who.

Xtina waited for the Irish Auto Association to show up while I stayed at the apartment wrangling the bags and the kids. After a while a guy showed up on a scooter with a portable car battery and jumped the Opel. The cost? Absolutely free.

(Xtina has come up with a nickname for me based on my extreme reluctance to drive: Dan The Car Coward. Xtina is, of course, Her Majesty, Queen Shopsalot.)

Around noon we hit the south road, N7, toward Limerick. En route we stopped in Roscrea, a charming little town entirely surrounding a Norman castle built in 1280. The Roscrea castle looks a lot like the one at Bunratty: A great room on the first floor with a fireplace big enough to cook a buffalo; kitchen, dining, and sleeping quarters are on the upper three floors and narrow winding stone staircases climb to towers in each corner.

Near the entrance is a dungeon known as an 'oublietter' (from the French for 'to forget'), a 2' by 2' hole in the floor with a grate over it, leading to a square basement maybe 20 feet deep. You got in (or out, if you were lucky) by a rope ladder. The castle guide said the Normans would put someone in there and forget about them. The castle also featured a machiolation over each entrance and a 'murder hole' in front of the portcullis through which boiling oil would be poured over unwelcome visitors (a feature that would come in quite handy today when Republican fundraisers come knocking).

In the 18th century a British family named Damer bought the castle and built a large Queen Anne style residence on its grounds. Their descendants still live there. But the bottom two floors are a museum dedicated to the relics found nearby, including a 35kg (80 pound) hunk of petrified butter dating from 988 AD. The bog butter explains a lot about the current Irish diet (strangely, ancient jars of mayonnaise were not also found nearby).

[Note: a writer for the Sunday Tribune, Helen Lucy Burke, tasted the bog butter in 1987, which at time of its discovery was thought to be cheese. She described it thusly:

Close up, the boulder smelled cheesy, ripe, even athlete's footy. An inviting piece had crumbled off and lay at the base. I palmed the fragment, and at a suitable moment popped it in my mouth, rolling it on my tastebuds. The flavour was definitely cheesy, and though unpleasing, not revolting either. The texture was oddly granular. It came closest to a Wensleydale cheese which had dried out: Wensleydales are only tolerably fresh.]

We drove through a spectacular sunset over Limerick, the horizon glowing deep orange like a pizza oven, followed by a full moon rising. We arrived in Ennis after dusk and checked into the Temple Gate Hotel, a lovely 3-star hotel in the heart of the city. In a previous life it had been a convent for the Sisters of Mercy, but 10 years ago it was converted to a hotel. Xtina's aunt Nula was educated there, and she says the Sisters showed very little Mercy. The old chapel had been turned into the hotel's bar and and is now a great room for weddings and such; the stained glass windows sport the logos of Bulmer's and Stella Artois.

We stashed the kids in the room -- they seemed ecstatic to be on their own and away from us for a few hours -- and had a pint in the library off the lobby, underneath the ubiquitous portrait of Joyce. We moved from there to the hotel pub, where more pints were consumed, dinner had, and Xtina went wild on the hotel's free Wifi hotspot -- uploading photos to the blog, chatting, calling people on Skype. It was like finding an oasis of connectivity after weeks in the Netless desert. Every so often one of the kids would come downstairs to find us and lodge a complaint about the other one, but they seemed to be having a good time.

Around 10 pm the "band" came on: An older couple who looked a little like Mary Travers and Peter Yarrow if you squinted (or had drunk three pints). He played guitar and electronic keyboard and sang backup; she sang lead and banged a tambourine. Their voices were fed through the keyboard, giving them an oddly robotic sheen.

They launched into The Carpenter's "On Top of the World" which then sequed surreally into "Help Me Make it Through the Night" without changing tempo or melody. So we went from 'on top of the world looking down on creation' to 'let the devil take tomorrow, Lord, tonight i need a friend.' In a place where nunneries become bars, it seemed like a apt metaphor. Then again, maybe it was just the Guinness.