Ireland Revisited: Back to Birr!

Day 4 of 35: Saturday, August 7, 2010

A last glimpse out of our airport hotel window before heading off to the Midlands and back to Birr. Note the approaching airliner in the upper-left and the old cottage -- an island of the past in a sea of autos -- at lower-center.

We checked out of the hotel at about eleven, expecting to reach Birr at about one o'clock. We took the new M4 motorway (not available to us in 2006) and came in via Tullamore, which brought us to Birr considerably earlier than we had planned. It was a very pleasant, easy, scenic drive. As we entered County Offaly, we had a sense of coming home that became more intense the closer we came and the more familiar the land and the roads grew.

The old home-away-from, the Bothy, Birr Castle Demesne

When we arrived, staff had not quite finished preparing the Bothy for us, so we spent a couple of hours driving around Birr and the nearby countryside, re-acquainting ourselves. Many things had changed in four years, the most obvious of which was a new Tesco supermarket on the south side of town. Among its charms, in addition to groceries for the cottage's kitchen, were an ATM and a checker from Southern California who had recently moved here with her Irish husband.

Would look right at home in San Jose

We spent the late afternoon and evening strolling the Demesne grounds.

Fallen champion and as it appeared in 2006

We found that the great old Champion beech tree by the lakeside near the telescope had come down, and, while we were inspecting its stump, Lord Rosse appeared (with clipboard and pruning loppers, out tending things as is his wont on summer evenings.) He told us that the tree had been felled only a day before, at the insistence of the company that was insuring the Game and Country Fair later this month, because of evidence of rot. That's a shame; it was one of our favorites on the Demesne's Red Tree Trail.

Familiar charms:

The Leviathan of Parsonstown...

... the falls in the Fernery in gathering dusk...

... the old brick bridge over the Little Brosna...

... and the Bothy's "secret gate" to the gardens.

It was delicious to be back.

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This day's short slide show can be seen by clicking here.
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Next: August 8, 2010 -- Reunion with an Old Friend
Previous: August 6, 2010 -- The National Stud

Ireland Revisited: The National Stud

Day 3 of 35: Friday, August 6, 2010

We had one more day to spend in the Dublin area before our time in our home in the Midlands was to begin. When planning the trip, we thought it would take us a couple of days after arrival to shake jetlag and to get used to driving on the left side of the road again. We were wrong on both counts; by Friday we were ready to hit the road and get out of the city.

Once we picked up our rental car on Friday morning, we set out straight away for the Irish National Stud in Kildare, about 40 miles away, and spent almost the entire day there. It's an outing I highly recommend to anyone who likes horses, gardens, and fine scenery.


Above, a stallion is led to the teaser box. At left, Diane has a chat with Indian Haven.

There were many children among the visitors to the National Stud on our day there, almost all of them little girls. Of course.

Fillies and a colt.

The National Stud grounds also boast a museum, a formal Japanese Garden, and a large, lovely, semi-wild parkland called St. Fiachra's Garden. Above, a stony St. Fiachra, patron saint of gardeners, contemplates his domain.

For the second day in a row, Diane attracts gardeners' attention.

The National Stud is evidently a popular wedding site. Low-hanging jokes will be left for harvesting in comments, if anyone cares to.

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The Irish National Stud is a truly beautiful place. If you want to spend a few more minutes with other images from the place, please visit our slide show for this day.

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Next: August 7, 2010 -- Back to Birr!
Previous: August 5, 2010 -- Alive in Dublin

Ireland Revisited: On Our Way

Day 0 of 35: Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Leaving San Francisco: checking luggage and getting United Airlines Departure Management Cards

This trip had an odd pair of bookends: close encounters with famous old rock guitarists. While trudging through security in San Francisco we were in line next to Carlos Santana; the night before departure from Dublin at the end of the journey we stayed in a hotel room next to one occupied by Ronnie Wood. I don't know what to make of that.

I do know what to make of United Airlines' "Departure Management Cards," though. I hate them.

When we checked in at the United counter at SFO for our flight to Chicago (where we were to connect to an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin,) we were given what we thought were boarding passes. Looking at them more closely, though, they were labeled Departure Management Cards. My thought that the term was just pretentious preciousness of corporate language disappeared when we arrived at the gate. It turns out that they mean that your flight is overbooked, and actual boarding passes will be issued at the gate -- for those who are selected by an undisclosed process.

We had a tense hour at the crowded gate as passenger after passenger was called to the counter to be given an actual boarding pass. Our questions and protestations that we had bought the tickets eight months in advance and that we had an international connection to make were met with frigid politeness but nothing else.

We got the last two boarding passes, and were the last passengers to board.

We didn't really need that exercise of our adrenal glands, but it did prepare us psychologically for the return trip five weeks later when the same thing happened in Chicago on the last leg of our return journey.

Aloft between San Francisco and Chicago

After that, the trip was smooth. The connection in Chicago was trouble-free. It was a delight, actually. When we checked in at the airy, uncrowded Aer Lingus counter we were greeted by a young employee who was as warm and helpful as the United folks in San Francisco were the opposite. When she spoke, and Diane and I heard her Midlands accent, I think we both grinned about as widely as was physically possible.

Aer Lingus's St. Aoife in Chicago, ready to board

Soon after lifting off from Chicago in the late afternoon, headed eastward into the night, we settled into our diversions, Diane with her iPod and movies, me with the active flight map on the screen in front of me and with Campbell Black's autobiographical All That Really Matters, written under his pseudonym "Campbell Armstrong." (We were to meet Campbell and his wife Rebecca in a couple of weeks, and I wanted to be prepared.) The book -- published in the U.S. with a title Campbell hates, I Hope You Have A Good Life -- was a riveting diversion.

We didn't expect to sleep on the flight, and we didn't. Someplace in darkness over the Atlantic, Tuesday turned into Wednesday.

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Next: August 4, 2010 -- Dazed in Dublin, and the slide shows begin on sharrington.net.
Previous: August 2, 2010 -- Prologue

Ireland Revisited: Prologue

View from our hotel window: two planes departing from San Francisco International Airport.

One year ago today, Diane and I left home on our way back to Ireland, but we didn't leave Northern California that day. We stayed the night of Monday, August 2nd, 2010 in a hotel near the San Francisco airport, thinking that we would be more rested for the long flights to Dublin that way. That was probably true, but we were both so excited that neither of us slept much that night, anyway.

What follows for the next five weeks in this blog will be short, day-by-day accounts of our second trip to Ireland on the one-year anniversary of the days -- or at least that's my intent. Despite having had a year to prepare for this exercise, I haven't written out the posts ahead of time, so the project might morph a bit as we go on.

Destination: the Bothy, Birr Castle Demesne.

My main hope for these blog entries is that they provide context for photos from the trip that will appear over on sharrington.net, as a similar project did a year after our first trip. Those photos will start to appear on August 4th, but each entry here will have a picture or several, too, as this one does.

The Ft. Harrington pickup, waiting to be picked up in the hotel parking lot. Adam and Lynda met us at the hotel to say good-bye and for Adam to take command of the Dodge. (Viewed in a larger size by clicking on the photo you can read the stickers: Offaly and Tipperary, the two Irish counties in which parts of Birr Castle Demesne lie.)

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A HUGE THANK-YOU

Regular readers of this blog know that we live in a place that isn't exactly easy to care for or, for newbies, to get to. It is inhabited by more animals than is reasonable unless you're in a business that requires them, like farming or chicken-racing. It requires a lot of work just to keep the rain forest from taking over, let alone keep "clean," a word I seem to remember meaning something other than what it does after a dozen years of living in Fort Harrington.

It is, in short, a hard place to take care of.

It's especially hard to take care of it if it's not where you live, is two hours or more from your home and your spouse, and is not set up properly for you to do what you need to do for a living (say, for example, has no suitable studio space but does have a dog that barks at random times, both of which can be a hindrance if you're in the voiceover business.)

Adam in Ft. Harrington

Thank you, Adam Harrington. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Next: August 3, 2010 -- The return begins.

Oh, No.

In Belfast last night:



Yes, it's as bad as it looks.

When we were there a year ago, the occasional "RIRA" graffiti in Ulster cities and reports of UVF thuggery could be dismissed hopefully as the work of low-level hooligans using centuries of conflict as an excuse for what they would do anyway. After all, street crime is endemic to modern urban societies, isn't it?

Hope remains that this does not escalate, but the anxiety is ramping up.

UPDATE: Good background piece on the current state of affairs in Short Strand. The comments are illuminating, too.

Now They'll Have To Put Up Some Signs

Taoiseach Enda Kenny and President Barack Obama in the White House, March 17th, 2011 (Reuters photo)

Enda Kenny, the new Taoiseach* of the Republic of Ireland, visited the White House today, which was not a big surprise since it was St. Patrick's Day. What was a little bit of a surprise was the announcement that President Obama would visit Ireland in May, just before going on to visit that bigger island to its east.

While details of the visit have yet to be filled out, one place that the President made sure to mention that he will definitely visit is the tiny town of Moneygall in County Offaly, since one of his great-great-great grandfathers was a cobbler there before emigrating to the US during the Great Hunger in the 1850s.

We beat him to it.

Entering Moneygall from the East, August 21, 2010

Last August, we made a point of visiting Moneygall, since Obama's connection to the place has been pretty common knowledge since the 2008 election. It didn't take much effort, since Moneygall is in the same county as our home base in Birr and since it's right on the N7 which was, until the end of last year, the main road across the island from Dublin to Limerick. (The N7 has since been supplanted by the new M7 superhighway, which bypasses Moneygall entirely, but that stretch wasn't quite done last August.)

We expected to see plenty of references to Obama in Moneygall, given the special relationship most Irish feel with the United States. JFK is still greatly revered by many, as is Reagan to a slightly lesser extent.

The N7 (now the R445, downgraded from a National to a Regional designation after the completion of the M7 superhighway) is Moneygall's main -- and just about only -- street.

We saw none. No signs, banners, pictures... nothing. In retrospect, we probably shouldn't have expected any. Kennedy and Reagan are remembered there not simply because they were American presidents of Irish lineage -- there have been plenty of those -- but because they came to Ireland and showed respect for the connection by showing regard for the Irish people.

Bustling downtown Moneygall.

So, I reckon, there will be signs and banners, photographs and window shrines for Obama if we were to go back next August.

*"Taoiseach," pronounced TEE-sock (approximately) is the title of Ireland's prime minister, the head of government. The word means leader or chieftain.

A Young Irish Earl's Rough Start

Birr Castle, Ireland, in August, 2010

Laurence Parsons had a bit of a challenging start in his tenure as the Fourth Earl of Rosse.

He was only 26 years old when news of his revered father's death in Dublin reached Birr Castle, the family home in the Irish midlands, in the Fall of 1867. Both his father and his grandfather had not acceded to the position until they were in their forties, but youth alone was probably not the most daunting aspect of his succession. His father, William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse, was a multi-talented man of great accomplishment and high reputation. While primarily remembered today as the designer and maker of a revolutionary huge telescope, the Third Earl was also much admired in the midlands for his family's work to alleviate the effects in King's County (now County Offaly) of the 1840s' Great Hunger and among the Irish people for his clear-headed approach to governmental duties. While not entitled to a seat in the House of Lords by birth alone, he was elected as an Irish Representative Peer in 1845, thus gaining his place in London's halls of power through accomplishment rather than DNA.

The Third Earl of Rosse and his Countess, Mary, in May of 1850. They are shown looking over drawings of a galaxy whose spiral form was first seen by Lord Rosse using his "Leviathan of Parsonstown" during the prior decade. This drawing is by Charles Piazzi-Smyth, a renowned astronomer (and, some would say, crackpot as concerns the pyramids of Egypt), one of many luminaries of science who frequented Birr Castle in the mid-1800s. Illustration from and courtesy of the Birr Castle Archives.

Young Laurence Parsons clearly had big hessians to fill. As though that weren't enough, though, fate dealt him a pair of odd and disquieting incidents in his first two years on the job.

The Policemen Would Listen to No Explanation

Just a little more than a year after his father's death, in the late Fall of 1868, Lord Rosse and a party of friends went hunting north of Parsonstown (now Birr) in the general direction of Banagher on the River Shannon. Included in the party were the Earl's 20-year-old brother Randal and two teenaged brothers, Clere and Charles. As the party rode southward toward home in the gathering twilight, they were accosted -- not by outlaws, but by the law. A yellowing newspaper clipping in the Birr Castle Archives recounts the incident thusly:

A Lord Taken Prisoner by Drunken Policemen Under Menace of a Loaded Rifle.
(From Our Correspondent)
Parsonstown, Tuesday.
An incident among the strangest in the history of the police force, and one which is affording considerable local gossip, has just happened in this neighbourhood. The Earl of Rosse, accompanied by his brothers and some friends, were returning along the Banagher road from shooting on Saturday evening, and within a mile of the Castle they were met by some Constabulary of the Annah Station, who peremptorily ordered the young nobleman to halt, one of the policemen giving proof that the command was no joke by deliberately loading his rifle and making the most convincing gestures. His lordship and party had the presence of mind to forego a long parleying, simply contenting themselves by stating who they were. But the policemen would listen to no statement or explanation, and his lordship and his party had no alternative but to save themselves from the indignity of the handcuffs, or, probably, a personal encounter, by going with the policemen into town, where the tables were soon turned, as the Sub-Inspector, on hearing the strange narrative, forthwith had the whole of his Lordship's late escort taken into custody. The Constabulary escapade is to form the subject of an investigation, and very likely will lead to unpleasant results to the policemen, two of whom at least were intoxicated, and all were in charge of the Constable of the Station.

The escapade did, in fact, lead to unpleasant results for the police involved. Also in the castle archives is this groveling letter from the island's top cop of the time, the Chief Constable of Ireland in Dublin:

Constabulary Office, Dublin Castle
8 Dec. 1868
My Lord,
I have received, and read with pain, the report of the misconduct of the party of Constabulary towards your Lordship and your friends on the evening of the 28th.
I am glad to think that conduct like that in question towards any individual is, on the part of the Constabulary of very rare occurrence. But that such an outrageous and uncalled for interference with a person of your Lordship's position, and in your own immediate neighbourhood should have taken place, is I believe without precedent.
My duty calls upon me to recommend the dismissal of Constable Burke and Sub-Constable Coyle.
As regards the former, I may mention that he has served 30 years without ever having been, until now, reported for drunkenness, - and that he is married and has a large family.
Should you think fit for these reasons to interfere in his behalf, I shall consider the discipline of the Force...

... and, unfortunately, the last page of the letter is missing. There is also no record of a response from the young Earl, so the fate of Constable Burke and his ability to continue to feed his large family is not now known. A curt scrawl at the top of the letter in the Fourth Earl's handwriting gives us a clue, though: "Constabulary defence of annoyance to our Party." Burke probably didn't fare well.

Less than a year later, an unprecedented and much darker event not of his making shook Laurence Parsons's family.

You Killed Her, You Bury Her

St. Brendan's Church of Ireland, Birr, on a gloomy January day, 2011. Photograph courtesy of and copyright by Stephen Callaghan. (Mr. Callaghan is very skilled and talented with a camera; I urge you to come back later and click on his name to see what I mean.)

Mary King was born near Ferbane, a village about ten miles north of Birr Castle along the road from Parsonstown (now Birr) to Athlone. Her mother, Harriette, was Laurence Parsons's great-aunt, and the King family were frequent visitors to Birr Castle during his father's heyday. In her teens, Mary became acquainted with many of the prestigious scientists who visited Birr Castle and its great telescope and other engineering marvels -- and began her own lifelong fascination with science in general and optical devices in particular. Girls of the time in Ireland were not afforded formal education, but Mary's inquisitiveness, intelligence, and moxie propelled her to eventual scientific prominence anyway. Among other distinctions she gathered as an adult, in the 1860s she was one of only three women entitled to receive the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society -- the other two being Mary Sommerville (after whom Sommerville College of Oxford University is named) and Queen Victoria.

Mary King Ward (probable identification based on hairstyle) in a detail from one of Piazzi-Smyth's drawings. Her likeness is more commonly seen in a photograph by Countess Mary Rosse, wife of the Third Earl of Rosse, herself a pioneering woman in science and technology. Illustration from and courtesy of the Birr Castle Archives.

In addition to a keen scientific mind, Mary was intensely enthusiastic about bringing the excitement of science to young people. She wrote several very successful books for youngsters, published as were all of her writings under her married name, Mary Ward. She drew the illustrations for her books herself, and they embody even today her lighthearted earnestness. Of her books for children she said that she wanted them to be "an agreeable bait by means of which unwary youth may find themselves caught in the meshes of science while seeking only amusement."

Bug fun: "The Insect Maypole" by Mary Ward as reproduced in Whatever Shines Should Be Observed by Susan M. P. McKenna-Lawlor (see recommended reading at the end of this post.)

Mary's personal life was not very easy. When she was 27 she married Henry Ward, a striking military man who had served in the Crimea and who was a son of Viscount Bangor of County Down in the Northeast of Ireland. A year after their marriage, Henry made a disastrous career choice: he chose not to have one. He resigned his commission as Captain and devoted the rest of his life to social activities and sports, thus burdening his family with aristocratic activities without aristocratic income. It fell to Mary to provide for the family -- and to bear his eleven children -- but there is no evidence that she ever expressed anything but good cheer and optimism. They moved from home to home, each more austere than the previous one, until they finally wound up in a simple, unfurnished Dublin rental house in 1868.

The following year, in August of 1869, she and Henry made the trip halfway across Ireland to visit Birr Castle and, presumably, to check on how young Laurence was doing as Lord Rosse. On Tuesday afternoon, August 31st, one of the Parsons engineering marvels was brought out for a romp: a self-propelled steam carriage of the Third Earl's design which could reach speeds up to seven miles per hour on a good road. The family tutor (home schooling is a long tradition in the Parsons family), Richard Biggs, is said to have been steering the contraption, the younger two boys, Clere and Charles, were feeding fuel to the boiler, and Mary and Henry were perched on the passengers' bench. The auto steamed out of the gates of the Castle demesne and up Oxmantown Mall toward St. Brendan's Church of Ireland at its junction with the road to Tullamore. Randal was walking along behind; the only brother not present was the young Earl himself.

Birr Castle Demesne gates in August, 2006.

At the church, Mr. Biggs steered the steamer right, toward the center of Parsonstown and into disaster.

There are conflicting accounts of exactly what happened -- Biggs may or may not have run over a curbstone, the vehicle may or may not have overturned -- but somehow Mary was thrown from the bench to the ground and was crushed by one of the vehicle's massive iron wheels. She was taken to a nearby physician's home where she died within minutes of her grievous injuries, "a broken neck, her jaw was greatly fractured, and she was bleeding from the ears" according to the doctor's statement.

Mary Ward, noted scientist, educator, and pioneer in women's rightful ability to contribute to science, had become the world's first automobile fatality.

In grief and anger, the young Lord Rosse had the steam carriage destroyed, and no photograph or drawing or plan of it exists. Her husband Henry was obviously unable to provide for a fitting funeral and burial, so Lord Rosse sent a telegram to Mary's brother John about the issue. His response was, "You killed her, you bury her." Mary Ward remains the sole "non-lineal" member of the extended family to be entombed in the Parsons vault in Birr.

Coda

Mary Ward's spirit lives on in a very strange yet delightful way. One of her great-granddaughters is Lalla Ward, a former actress perhaps most well-known for her role as Princess Astra and the second incarnation of Romana in the great television series "Doctor Who." Lalla, born Sarah Ward, retired from acting in 1992 after marrying biologist and author Richard Dawkins.

She now draws illustrations for her husband's science books. Great-grandma would be proud.

Lalla Ward in character as Romana. Source unknown.

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Strongly recommended reading:

The chapter on Mary Ward in Whatever Shines Should Be Observed by Susan M. P. McKenna-Lawlor, volume 292 in the Astrophysics and Space Science Library

Section 1 of Chapter 6, "Teenagers without their father", in From Galaxies to Turbines: Science, Technology and the Parsons Family by W. Garrett Scaife

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Steam-powered carriages can still be seen in County Offaly -- at least once a year, in the Birr Heritage Week parade. Below is a video clip of one such that Diane and I took in August, 2006. Part of the south wall of Birr Castle is in the background. A much higher-resolution version can be seen here.

Five Weeks in Six Minutes

County Clare, Summer 2010

One of the nice things about taking an insane number of photos while on vacation is that you get to spend a huge amount of time at home deciding what to do with them and then doing it. In a way, it's like taking the trip over for free. That's the way it worked when we were in Ireland in 2006, and that's the way it's working now with the 2010 batch -- only more so.

I've published a few things so far in this space from that trip (here, here, and here, for example, along with the whole "Erin Go Thud" business), but I'm taking my time with the two big pieces. The biggest, an account of the trip in the style of the "HI-POD" series of 2007, is scheduled to be posted on the one-year anniversary of the days, as it was then. The next-biggest, an annotated slide show on sharrington.net, is in process now.

The first step in putting together that slide show was to select the images we wanted to be in it. We picked about 750, or approximately 20% of the available images. The next step was to shrink the selected images to a web-friendly file size, a step I just finished today. That's when I had an "ah-HA!" moment for a little additional project, inspired by Pummelvision (thanks, Mary Ellen Carew!) and by my son Adam's recent work in putting together video clips. Why not slap those 750 images together in very rapid fashion to produce a Pummelvision-style, mad-speed version of the entire trip?

So I did.



(You won't be able to view this video in Germany, due to copyright issues there about the soundtrack -- a jig by James Galway and the Chieftains.)

YouTube's processing clipped the top few percent off each frame, which is kind of irritating but I can't see how to fix that without expending way too much effort. All of these images will be available in still, annotated form over on sharrington.net within a couple of months.

The frames come at you in strict chronological order, so lots of views of our headquarters, Birr Castle Demesne, are interspersed throughout. And, for you Bothy Cat fans, she's liberally sprinkled throughout as well.

Enjoy! You should view this at the highest resolution your download speed (and patience) will allow. Cranking up the volume wouldn't hurt, either.

A Grave Post

Before Diane and I left for Ireland earlier this year, I posted an offer in this space to take photos while we were there for anyone who had a specific place or thing in mind. Our friend Ronnie Peterson took us up on that, as did a friend of mine over on Flickr.

Ronnie's request and its great benefits to us have been chronicled here earlier. Linda ("chocolatepoint" over on Flickr) asked thusly for something that proved, similarly, to be of more benefit to us (in the places we sought out that we might not otherwise have seen) than to her:

Thanks for the kind offer to take a photo that I might want. I don't have anything specific in mind. If you happen to roll by an interesting old cemetery, though, and feel like taking a few shots, I wouldn't mind seeing the photos. You know how I love old cemeteries and genealogy and such. Don't go out of your way, though!

Our ultimate response to Linda can be seen by clicking here, transporting you over to sharrington.net. The set that lives there includes, among others, these sights:

Passage to the heart of the Neolithic tomb at Knowth,

the 12th Century Dominican Priory ruins at Lorrha, far northern Tipperary,

the ancient monastic city at Clonmacnoise on the Shannon, and

Fury.

Once again, click here to view the full set.

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Come Sit with Me a While

When we visited Birr Castle Demesne the first time, in 2006, I was fascinated by the carefully-collected and maintained forest of the place, the product of multiple generations’ passion for and expertise in dendrology. Among the thousands of trees cared for by the current Lord Rosse on this 135 acre estate is a group which compose the “Red Tree Trail,” four dozen specimens of great interest (for a variety of reasons). The trail itself winds through almost all of the Demesne, and following it is a good way for a visitor to become familiar with many of the nooks and byways of this marvel of private forests, gardens, and meadows.

A copy of the little guide book for the trail, Fifty Trees of Distinction, is available to tenants of the cottage we stayed in then (and again this year) and copies can be bought at the Demesne’s Science Centre; the Bothy copy is pictured here by the four-century old “Carroll Oak” midway through the trail. (Two trees of the trail have died since 2006, hence the difference between the booklet’s title and my “four dozen.”) The booklet gives great descriptions of each tree along the way, including scientifically-noteworthy aspects of the species or the specimen or both – but it lacks pictures.

We of course bought our own copy of the booklet to take home with us, but the lack of illustrations bothered me. I set out to fix that for us, personally, by recording as many of the 50 as I could in photographs so we could look back at them at leisure when thumbing through the booklet at home. The project was a very nice exercise for me in 2006, introducing me to parts of the Demesne’s parkland that I might not otherwise have seen.

The effort was a great success. I managed to document at least three images of each specimen: one full-tree, one bark detail, and one leaf detail. Those images were put on the web as The Red Tree Trail on our personal website, and they’ve evidently been of use to more people than just Diane and me. According to Google Analytics, the title page alone has been accessed more than 5,000 times by people in 103 countries (which is probably pretty much all of them), and individual trees’ pages much more than that due to searches for images of individual species.

When we arrived this past August for our second stay in the Demesne, I had no particular such project in mind – until the first time I sat on a bench near the Bothy, enjoying the view and thinking about some of the requests for photos that I had solicited from readers earlier this year. Particularly, I was thinking about my friend Margaret Ryall, who stayed in the Bothy in 2008.

Margaret, a very fine artist and educator in St. Johns, Newfoundland, produced a wonderful suite of works based on her experiences in Birr called “Reading a Garden.” When I asked her if there were any photos she wanted me to take this year, her reply was that I should take a “Margaret picture,” which she couldn’t specify ahead of time, but she was sure I’d recognize when I saw it.

I did. And it wasn’t just one picture, it was a whole series.

Many of her works based on her stay in the Demesne focused on its benches, and the sights both large- and small-scale a patient viewer could see from them. So, I thought on my bench in early August, what better “Margaret picture” than views from the benches themselves?

So I set out on a gentler project in 2010 than 2006’s Red Tree Trail: one in which I’d produce for a number of benches not only the view (in large-scale, panoramic form), but also a context-establishing shot of the bench itself and a detail from the view that especially captured my interest for one reason or another.

Detail from Bench #5.

The result is a set of web pages that requires a bit more participation from the viewer than Red Tree Trail does. The panoramas that make up the heart of the project are very large files that the viewer needs to download. The panorama files are in a format that is designed to fill typical monitors’ screens top-to-bottom (or nearly so), spilling well offscreen to left and right. Then, panning left and right will give the viewer a little better sense of “being there” than a single, static snapshot can do.

Please come and sit a spell once in a while with me on the benches of Birr Castle Demesne. The views are not intended to be seen all in one sitting; come back once in a while during your long winter and sit on a new bench and take in its fresh perspective from an Irish summer. And, if you really need transporting, a good soundtrack is provided by The Gardens of Birr Castle Demesne by Karin Leitner and Duccio Lombardi on flute and harp.

Here’s the link:

Birr Castle Demesne: Views from the Benches

Enjoy!

(And thank you, Margaret.)

Erin go Thud, Part Three and Last

(Click the following links to see:
Part 1, or
Part 2.)

View northward from the Seaview B&B, Friday, 13 August, 2010.
This was the only photo I took that day -- a shame, really, since it was a spectacularly-clear day -- since we had a lot of other things to think about.

The morning of Friday the 13th was abysmal. Diane was in pain, since the prescription painkillers she had finally been given the night before had worn off, we each had virtually no sleep at all, we were afraid that we wouldn't be able to even go home (let alone follow our month's itinerary) as planned -- but, most of all, we were in a major medical situation in a country (the UK) that was foreign to the foreign country (the Republic of Ireland) in which our home base was.

We hadn't a clue as to what to do. So we cast about for information, and the best, quickest help we received was from our friend Lady Rosse back in Birr. She immediately contacted her own health-care providers with our questions, and kept us up-to-the minute with frequent e-mail messages and telephone calls. By mid-morning she had determined what we should do: as soon as we could, return to the Republic and go to the nearest Regional Hospital to Birr, one in Tullamore (only about half an hour by car north of Birr -- but about five hours away from where we were in Northern Ireland.) We shouldn't wait for a "fracture clinic," we shouldn't apply for an appointment with an orthopedist -- we should just get to Tullamore.

Just that information alone put us so much more at ease that it is hard to describe -- the pain and the anxiety were still there, but the feeling of being lost and totally ignorant was gone. And we have Lady Rosse to thank for that.

The remainder of the day was more or less adrenaline-free. We had to wait until the following day to try to drive south, since Diane's cast was still curing and travel was not advisable. She spent the day resting in Mabel Dunlop's spare bedroom, and I spent it driving around gathering various medical supplies.

Primary among the supplies I needed to get was a bottle of the pain medication that had been prescribed at the hospital in Coleraine the night before. I found a little pharmacy ("chemist's shop") in nearby Bushmills. The young lady to whom I passed my slip of paper looked at it, then at me, and asked a question in a language that had only a passing similarity to any English I am used to. Turns out that the Ulster brogue is far more like Scottish than it is like most Irish dialects, and I was baffled. We actually needed an interpreter (a very amused stock clerk) to communicate. We got our business done, but the poor young lady was irritated and I was embarrassed to my toes.

Given all of that, it wasn't until I got out to the rental car with my little bag that I realized: I hadn't paid for the pills! I went back in to pay... and was rewarded by a warm smile from my linguistic antagonist. It was a prescription. There is no charge for that.

Heading out of Antrim: serene farmland on a Saturday morning.

The following morning was clear and bright and augured well (and truly, as it turns out.) After our fourth great Ulster fry breakfast from Mabel, we set out southward for the Republic and for Tullamore.

At the Bernish viewpoint, just north of the border along the A1 motorway. Why the crutches are not attached to a human, and why the human is not in the picture in this isolated spot, will be left to the speculation of the viewer.

The drive south was very easy, facilitated by long stretches of brand-new "motorways" -- multi-lane divided highways -- in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. Our route took us through Belfast, around Dublin, and then rapidly into County Offaly in the heart of the island.

Suspension bridge over the Boyne on the Republic's M1 motorway.

We arrived at the Tullamore hospital at about three in the afternoon on this Saturday, steeled to endure yet another long, long wait in an understaffed emergency room. Ireland, like the UK, has "socialized medicine," after all, so we just figured we were in for a dose of the same medicine we endured up in Coleraine.

Not at all.

We were in and out in an hour, and considerably happier on the "out" than the "in." Inake ("triage") was quick, efficient, and friendly. The wait in a nearly-empty A&E waiting room was mere miniutes, and the physician who saw Diane was -- probably just by extraordinarily lucky chance -- a retired orthopedist who was just helping out on that Saturday afternoon.

Emergency department, Tullamore Regional Hospital, Co. Offaly, 14 August 2010.

After a quick study of the x-rays we had brought with us from Northern Ireland, he saw that the bone chips in Diane's ankle were very old, that there was no bone injury involved, and that the "box" (as he called her cast) was doing far more harm than good. He hacked off her cast in minutes (meanwhile carrying on a charming chatter about all manner of things), told Diane that the best thing she could do to facilitate healing of her sprain was to walk on it as much as she could tolerate, and sent us on our way.

It was as though a slab the size of the Clonfinlough Stone had been taken off the tops of our heads. We would be able to fly home when the time came. We would not be immobile for the remainder of our stay in Ireland.

There were still concerns and regrets, of course: concern primarily about Diane's pain. That would continue throughout the rest of the stay, helped a lot by some painkillers and by a lot of her own stubborn determination, but strong enough to eliminate a couple of major excursions we had planned (which were replaced by adventures we hadn't planned, so no net loss!) Derry was out on this trip, as was a return to the Connemara Pony Show, but that only reinforces our determination to make at least one more trip to the island, somehow, some way.

We were almost giddy when we finally rolled through the castle gates that evening, and up to the Bothy's door. Our plans had taken a major hit, but not our prospects.

"Home," inside the Bothy, 2010.

Coda: Trying to draw any conclusion about the benefits or ills of "socialized medicine" based on our experience with Diane's ankle injury would be silly. For one thing, each experience -- the negative one in Coleraine and the positive one in Tullamore -- was anecdotal and the product of a unique constellation of surrounding circumstances. Our feelings about the two hospitals could easily have been reversed. What if the major auto accident had taken place on Saturday afternoon in Tullamore instead of Thursday afternoon in Coleraine? What if the retired orthopedist had been helping out in the North instead of the South? Everything would have been different.

What is lastingly alien about both medical experiences, though, is that neither one of them included any financial stop along the way to treatment. We only recently received a small invoice from Tullamore (after a bit of fumbling on their part about where to send the bill), and have yet to hear anything from Coleraine. Our impression is that, in both countries, actually billing patients for medical care is so unusual that people "on the ground" in A&E facilities just don't think about it much, so bills can be very late in arriving, if ever.

We'll see. I still check my mailbox every day for a bill from Coleraine, but I'm not going to call them and ask them where it is.

Nymansay eucryphia near the Bothy on the Evening of Great Relief.

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