Tintern Abbey (Ireland, not Wales)

You can’t tell me there aren’t fairies here.

Why is there a Tintern Abbey? Let me see if I can tell you like an Irish person would.

Yer man William, see, was coming over from his lands in Wales because he had an Irish bride. The weather was shite, and he vowed that if he made it to land he’d build an Abbey as thanks to God that he made it. He did make it, the mad bastard, and he did build the Abbey, and he named it after the Abbey from his homeland.

The Cistercian Monks came over to do… Monk Stuff…. in the abbey. I had to look up “Cistercain” because I was like… like a cistern? What? This is what happens when you let a Heathen into the Holy Places…. Cistercain, for those like me who didn’t know, is like this: Catholics –> Benedictines –> Cistercains (also called Berndardines, also called White Monks). They believe in the “literal observance of the Benedictine Rule” and manual labor, agricultural work, and this surprised me; architecture and agricultural advances. The Trappists branched off from the Cistercains. There’s our lesson for the day, hopefully I got most of that right.

For a while … uh, I stepped away to make coffee (Hawk has a French Press rather than an electric coffee pot) and I’ve plum forgotten what sentence I was in the middle of. For a while, what? We walked around for a while? We watched birds for a while? WHAT WAS I SAYING????

Oh! I remember now. For a while, after being … unconsecrated? Something about Monastery Dissolution? Anyway, in the 16th Century parts of the Abbey were converted to a residence, and primarily the Colclough family lived there until the last surviving Colclough sold or donated it in 1959 and since then it’s been in renovation/conservation. Could you imagine this being your house?!

We didn’t actually pay the $5 to go into the abbey, but instead walked around the grounds for a couple of hours. We saw people. We saw dogs. We saw spots that 100% look like this is where you don’t eat the little cakes you see sitting enticingly on a rock in a random sunbeam. We also walked way the fuck out to a pub, and by “out” I mean “up” … yet somehow it was also up both ways? Ireland is an Escher print? only to find out that the pub didn’t open for almost three more hours. WHO OPENS A PUB AT 7 PM??? It was almost 4:30 and we thought they’d be open at 5, but HAHAHAHAH so we had to walk all the way back down without a pint first. I think I got about 22,000 steps that day.

Pardon my windblown hair. Also the gray… damn, my hair is getting gray! I wish it would just go the whole way already… this half gray on top, whatever the fuck color on the bottom stuff makes me feel like I’ve gotten a bad dye job. I thought about going all purple before the trip, but knew it would fade after a couple of weeks, so I didn’t bother. Well, maybe parts of this trip will be so stressful that I’ll wake up one morning and the whole mess will be white.

Anyway.

If you’d like to look for any Fae hiding in my other photos, you can find them here. The photos. Maybe the Fae, depends on how hard you look.

xoxo y’all