We are staying now at a WWOOFing place where there is a castle. As we were hanging about yesterday morning, they gave us the key to look inside. Look at the size of that key!
There's Yarrow holding the key out in the courtyard of the converted dairy where we are staying. The work boss and the lord of the manor play boules every Friday, starting in the courtyard and continuing on wherever they take the game. (When you play boules, you throw a white ball to serve as the goal post, then each person throws three balls each.)
We went first up to the front door, but we realized our giant key didn't fit the (admittedly, also extra-large) lock.
Then we went around to the side door, and the key worked, so we went in.
Here's the view up from the door.
And when we went inside, we saw a great arched hall. To the left side, we saw this staircase, so we went up.
This is the arched hall on the second floor. All three floors were almost identical, with enormous halls. The second floor also had two small rooms at the east side -- maybe the boss' bedroom? It was hard to tell. The rooms must have been beautiful once. We could see a few scraps of several thicknesses of painted plaster leftover. Really all it takes to glory up these places is lots of drywall mud, like we did with that old farmhouse we moved into and renovated back in the day.
As you can see here, it seems like there was also a balcony room above part of the hall, made of wood. There's just a closed off door now, and a ledge.
There was a giant fireplace with a bread oven in the side. I don't think that this castle had a separate kitchen, maybe they just cooked in the main hall. Maybe there was another kitchen outside the castle building? I don't have enough castle experience to know really. My photos here aren't great but with Yarrow standing in the fireplace, you get an idea of the size of it.
The back screen has a Bacchus on it, perhaps? I wasn't certain. There weren't any tourist guides around. :)
Here are some views from the top of the castle. The house below is the mansion that the boss lives in.
Leaning out a little (it was superscary up there so I did not lean as much as I needed to get a great shot) I caught the first courtyard, where our house is in, off to the left. It's a converted dairy. There's another courtyard behind that (we're getting it ready to house 100 Buddhist monks). Then there is about a 2-acre walled garden with a ten or twelve foot wall around it beyond that, and the other worker house/kitchen.
Can't resist the spiral staircase shot on the way down.
I wonder how many hands used this post for support on the way down too? Yarrow was marvelling that anyone could get down those in a long gown without tumbling head over heels.
Here's a shot of the view from our accommodation. As you can see, it's very nice in the sun.
A slightly less romantic fact about it is that it's very very cold, which is to be expected as it's an old dairy building. Of course it would have been designed to be cold, being the dairy. (Mind you almost all the buildings are cold inside around here it seems).
In church and in the pubs, people tend to keep their coats and boots on all the time. I took my coat off in church this morning but that was just craziness. I guess the 40-minute walk up to town from the farm warmed me up. Anyway I put the coat back on so I did.
It's funny to see ladies up at the front doing the bible readings in a coat. The organ player was a very nice man who actually never had lessons to learn how to play the organ or the piano. He played slow and people sang slow and kind of patchily but it was the old familiar sings and an organ filling up a church is a lovely thing isn't it.
We asked the lady behind us how old the church was and she said about 800 years, which we knew couldn't be right as Protestantism only came about with Henry VIII. We later found out (Yarrow asked, and was given a paper typed up by someone) that the church dates from 1633. We've had two people this week tell us something was "a thousand years old" when we asked when the thing in question couldn't possibly. I guess "a thousand" means "really" here. :)
As my old landlord Clarence just told me, "sift through the blarney." :)
Anyway it was nice to go to church for the music though I like the United Church of Canada sermons, where they tie in current events and history lessons, much more than the Anglican one here that was just reciting and reading the exact same texts over and over again.
Jumping topics again, just to be through: the other wwoofers at the place were: three Americans and a French guy. The French guy left and another French guy came. Conrad, the lord of the manor, told the new guy to meet him at an obscure little Thai ceremony in Cork, which is kind of funny. We went along to Cork for the amusement
I should be more complimentary and explanatory about the Americans. One is a woman from North Carolina who we have enjoyed some gardening time and talk with. Her boyfriend is from Southern California and just got accepted (yesterday) into the mathematics PhD program he was hoping for. They're a neat couple. The other American is a sort of super-wwoofer named Max. He has long clean blond hair (clean, nicely brushed, not dreadlocky). He carves wood and cooks and philosophizes and has opinions on lots of stuff. Even on bugs in ears, with experiential story (he did not actually ever have a bug in his ear, as it turned out, but he had the knowledge of how to get rid of one by pouring water in your ear).
The French guys both came to Ireland to work on their English. As you do. For that reason, we'll need to get back to France soon!
Update on our van situation: no update. We went and met her and put our stuff there, and have realized that really we will not be able to insure her. We have spent the week getting used to the idea of being backpackers or maybe even bikers. We'll see. Yarrow doesn't think his cat would be wild about the biking idea. We're not sure if we are either. Certainly not with Irish drivers on the road (who are worse than Italians). Maybe in France (but they're worse drivers than Italians too).
Anyway, the trip is evolving and the trip is good.
It feels good to be on the road.
As to the schooling, Yarrow's been doing well with doing his half hour of math a day, that's easy enough. He has been reading the chemistry book I found several years ago and saved for this year. And when we were working in the garden on Friday, he noticed a lot of botanical things. The kind of things about how plants grow and reproduce and deal with bugs that you'll never learn the same from a book.
We're eating lots of potatoes (there's toast and pasta too but we're trying to stay off the gluten a little). The lord of the manor also gets us the most delicious aged Irish cheddar, and lobster soup and fish soup and tapenade and aubergine sauce and just about everything you could want, really.
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