Looking to the past

It amazes me, whenever I think about it, how much we in Ireland take our culture for granted. It's so normal to see the remnants of hundreds-of-years-old castles and forts dotted about the countryside that we don't even notice them unless somebody takes the time to point them out.

Skry and I went down to Hook Head yesterday. The main point of the excursion was to see the lighthouse on the Hook. This lighthouse is about 800 years old, and the walls are four metres thick. They are so thick that the spiral staircase actually winds its way up within the walls rather than against them. But 800 years is only remarkable because the lighthouse was operational for all that time, not because it's so old. People from other parts of the world that don't have this culture of old buildings must find it absolutely amazing. Even on the road down there we passed countless ruins of forts and castles and tumble-down buildings that are so ordinary that they just crumble, unloved, where they stand.

We had a picnic lunch on the edge of a cliff beside the lighthouse, looking out over the sea. I'm not sure what sea, exactly - I suppose we were looking out over the Atlantic in some shape or form but I'm not sure where the boundaries are between the Atlantic proper and the other seas and channels that have names, around this island. Anyway it was a very nice lunch despite the mushiness of the over-ripe avocado in our sandwiches. The views from the top of the lighthouse were lovely, too, and we could see the farmers rushing to harvest as much as they could on this sunny day after months of rain. I'm not sure how visible it is, but in the photograph to the left you can just about see a smallish table-shaped rock resting on top of the other rocks jutting into the sea. This smallish rock weighs an estimated 20 to 30 tons, and it washed up in a storm. Glad I wasn't in the lighthouse for that one!

On our way to the Hook, we stopped for a quick look around Tintern Abbey in south Wexford. This abbey was founded in around 1200 AD so it's pretty old as well [understatement]. The abbey has been restored quite a bit since I was last there, as the government has been working to restore it to what it was like as an abbey rather than as an abbey-converted-to-a-house-then-fallen-into-disrepair which is what it turned into over the last few hundred years. As I have mentioned above, we are maybe too blase about old buildings, so for me the most interesting part was that the current buildings pump their sewage into a reed bed, which filters the water several times in the most natural way until it is pure enough to pump back into the river. Much better than running it through loads of chemicals in a treatment plant!