Capturing Castles

Yesterday was a trip around Galway and Offaly counties to look at castles for my Development of the Castle class. The class ended on Friday, it was only half the semester, so now I just have to write an essay for it by May. This also means I don't have class until 3 p.m. on Mondays, no class Tuesdays and no class until 2 p.m. on Thursdays. Sweeeeet.

But I'm a little sad the class is over. I thought it was very interesting and really liked the professor. The field trip was a lot of fun though! It was cool seeing what we learned about up close. We visited four castles -- and they're not like the fairy tale castles in Disney movies. We saw a fortified house, two tower houses and a crumbling masonry castle. The first one we saw was called Portumna Castle, it's a fortified house dating back to the early 17th century.

After that just a few miles down the road we went to Pallas Castle, which is a tower house built by the Anglo-Normans (as most of them were) dating back to the 16th century. It is surrounded by a bawn which is a defensive wall that surrounds the tower house. We got to climb up inside the tower, which was really cool.

(that's our professor chilling at the top, while another lecturer talked about the castle.)

(and me on the bawn wall!)

Then we saw another tower house, this one built by the Gaelic Irish. However, there was a bull inside of the bawn of the tower so we couldn't go inside of it. A lot of the properties around castles, especially smaller tower houses, are owned by local farmers and our professor wasn't able to get in contact with the owner of the land to check and see if the tower would be accessible.

Then we went on to lunch at a little restaurant/pub in Shannon. It was simple sandwiches, soup and chips. Chips here are fries and crisps are potato chips. Also, I have yet to have bad soup here - it is always amazing and usually some sort of seafood chowder or vegetable soup.

We then went on to the last castle, Clonmacnoise Castle. I think this one was by far my favorite just because of the location (right next to some bogs and the river Shannon) and also because it is falling apart - but in a really cool way. There is a fence surrounding it, so we snuck underneath to get a closer look - it was pretty funny seeing 50 kids wriggling their way under a fence. The castle is right by a monastery so we were also able to check that out. The monastery was founded in 545 by Saint Ciaran. It was one of the most famous monastery's in Ireland by the 9th Century. The cemetery near the monastery is filled with high crosses and a small church may hold the remains of the founder, St. Ciaran.