All About Old in Newrange/Trim/Monasterboice

We got back to the B&B so late last night that I didn’t get a chance to blog.  So I will be doing yesterday and today.

For those two people who are reading this, I apologize! LOL

Yesterday entailed a lot of driving and a lot of older things  And when I say OLD, I don’t mean just a hundred years or so.

Stay tuned for that.

We drove from Galway to Rush and it was a long drive because of course we got lost again.  On the way are all these enclosures/fences made out of stacked rocks.  It is quite incredible.  I wonder how long it takes them?

We got to the B&B and I feel like I have known Mary for a long time as we have been emailing back and forth for a few weeks now.  She is a lovely person with a heart of gold.

Here is our room this time.

I forgot to take a picture outside of the B&B but hopefully I will tomorrow or at least before I leave.

After we had a very long chat with Mary, we took our maps and went towards Newgrange.  You can take a tour but when we got there, it was full.  You need to get there pretty early to get a seat on the buses.  I took this picture from the window, about the only place you could see it.

Newgrange is built around 3200 BC.  It is the worlds oldest solar observatory.  On Winter Solstice which is December 21st,  the sun shines through the roof and travels through 19m passage and hits the center. You can buy tickets to see this now. We won’t be

We then went to Battle of the Boyne, then Monasterboice.  This was amazing!  It was a burial site with a LOT of high crosses.  They were all very interesting and some were extremely old.

This one was called Muiredach’s Cross which has scenes from the bible and is from the 10th century,

See what I mean by not just a few years old??

This is the description of what each of the engravings means.

I then just took some pictures of a few (okay more than a few) Celtic Crosses

1879, unbelievable

At this same place is this tower which was built 980 and crazy but it is called the Round Tower.  I cannot even understand that date and how they could have possibly done that in that era.

The purpose was for security from raids.  You could only get to the door with a ladder.

It was over 100 feet tall and held valuable manuscripts as well.

This was a step that was up and over the stone fence.

And speaking of old, this is not,  this is the car we are driving and when I say we, I mean Ron.  I wasn’t going to try to drive on the left as well as shift on the left.  Too much left brain stuff for me.

We drove to Trim from here where the Castle in the movie Braveheart is. It was closed but we could at least take some pictures and walk a bit around it.  It was built in the 12th century.  It is one of the oldest medieval castles in Europe.

 Looks very sinister here.

There is a huge wall all around the castle.  I took this way up on a hill so the walls don’t look very tall but they are.  So much history here.

On the left of this castle, on the hill was another tower that was probably a lookout or something like that.  But, really, who am I kidding… I don’t really know.  It looked very cool though.

This area is full of the history of Ireland and very interesting. We may go back but not sure if we can fit it in.

Until we meet again.