The Rock, and other medieval artefacts

One of my main interests in Ireland is the chance to go an wander round old ruins, and so far that is going pretty nicely. What I really wanted to be able to do was literally wander round them, without having to go on interpretative tours or look at re-enactments of breakfast, and it looks like you can do that here. I admit you don't get as much of the history, but personally I find it more powerful standing in silence and contemplating how the structure came to be and what became of it, than I do from a group talk.

The Rock of Cashel was a place I came across in a tourist brochure sometime when we were first planning this trip, and I thought it looked amazing. It is. The weather is supposed to be unrelentingly bad this week - the tourist info girl described the best day of the week as, and I quote, "drier" - but the morning we went to the Rock we got occasional patches of sun and blue sky. I've never seen weather change so quickly, literally from pelting rain and wind to blue skies and sun in a few minutes, and then back just as quickly. Getting pics was about a combination of planning and luck, which makes it pretty much like every other human endeavour!








From the Rock (so named because it is a rocky hill, the high point of the region and a Nationally important location historically), I spied a ruined Abbey (Hore Abbey) just sitting in a field at the bottom of the hill with cows in it. You just walk in, and wander round. Perfect. I still don't understand how medieval man managed to build these sorts of structures, and why modern buildings (spiritual and secular) are generally so awfully dull. There is a book I have called 'smalltown' which is a photographic essay about the unashamed and almost deliberate ugliness of Australia's small towns; an attitude that Tim Winton, in the introduction (in my opinion about the only interesting thing he has ever written), describes as 'fugliness'.

Surely it isn't much harder to design and build something with a bit of interest to it than something which is unrelentingly dull? I like modern building when it is done with panache, but stuff that is just functional and uninspired is depressing. Wandering around parts of Europe, you can't help but notice how damn boring most of what is being built in Australia these days is. Functional. World's biggest. Lazy.

Anyway, Hore Abbey and then Erdsfert Abbey just North of Tralee have been fun places to walk around. Exactly what I was wanting, and I have located several others to visit in the next few days. They are deceptively hard things to photograph, as they kind of defy having boxes put round them. I'm feeling like the images so far are a little too stereotypical. I like them, but you get the impression that they are the same photos that have been taken dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of times before. Maybe tomorrow I will find something new. It is going to be harder if it doesn't stop raining sometime!

Location:Ireland