Cahir Castle

On our drive from Wexford to Galway, in addition to stopping for gas and ALL THE SNACKS, we stopped at Cahir Castle. It was not the first time Hawk had been there, but it was the first time he was there and the castle was open!

The castle was built some time in the 1200s, and wasn’t breached in battle for almost four hundred years. Could you imagine living in something like that? Well, I mean, it’d probably be cold as fuck. And we’re probably more impressed with it than the people who lived there in the 14th and 15th centuries. I wonder, sometimes, if Irish people sort of … don’t see things like this any more. They’re right there. This castle was five feet away, max, from a busy road! If we had something like that here in the States, it’d be roped off, 500 yards in all directions, and we’d have to pay $50 to get in to see it and even then most of it would be untouchable. The Irish? It’s right there, people drive by it all the time, and there are signs on the few pieces of furniture that say “please don’t touch this” and people are just… expected to behave. It’s wild.

What most people get excited about are the movies that used it as a filming location, including one of Jeff’s favorite movies, Excalibur.

But the part that I got most excited about was the model in an upper tower. You’re telling me that there’s a job someone can get that consists of making miniatures like this?! That seems almost as unfair as me having a job where I sit around and make ceramics all the time.

I might have taken a lot of pictures of it.

Hawk and Jenn and I probably spent a couple of hours walking around. There was a dungeon that my claustrophobia would not let me go into, and there were some stairs that went up into a turret that I gave up on because they were steep and narrow and honestly by this point my hip had pretty much had it with me. I don’t know if it was the shoes, the walking, the stairs, the fall I took a couple of days before I left when the dogs slobbered water all over the tile floor, or what… but my hip was screaming at me with almost every step I took for almost the entire three weeks.

After we were done with the inside, we walked around Inch Park, outside of the castle. The park was lovely, and there were a couple of people letting their dogs run wild and that was so fun to watch. One dog was chasing a ball, one dog was chasing the other dog, and both were running in and out of puddles with abandon.

I love castles. I love them because I was raised on fairy tales and fantasy books, and those almost always have castles. We don’t have castles here in the States, so seeing them just… there? In the middle of a city? Blows my mind.

I get that times were hard then. People were cold and people were hungry and people worked hard and life expectancy wasn’t too terribly long. I’m not trying to romanticize castles and castle life. A lot of people probably died in all of them for a lot of different reasons, probably a good number of them women, and a good number of them dying from lack of any semblance of health care. Life was hard then if you lived in a castle, and life then was harder if you didn’t.

But still. A castle. Five feet from a busy road. That you can see every day when you take your dog to the park. How is there not some kind of magic in that?

PS. It was very windy.