This Christmas we went to Ireland and Scotland. Some colleagues / friends live in Scotland and everyone has to visit Ireland at least once!
Dublin was dressed up for the season. The shopping centers and the streets were filled with people buying just about everything.
We found the local cinema and saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. We really miss seeing movies.
We asked the local tourist lady to recommend a close place for a day trip and she sent us to Malahide Castle. It wasn't really a castle, more of a chateau with very extensive grounds. It was one of those huge family estates that get to be waaaay too expensive to maintain. This family sold it off in the 1970's and it has just been renovated. The old stables have been turned into the best gift shop we have ever seen. It has a full-blown restaurant, large deli and very large gift area.
We took a train over to Cork on the south side of the island. Ireland is surprisingly dull when seen from a train. No large hills or valleys and the horizon is neither very far away nor very close. It is green and pretty. Jim thinks this is one of the reasons for the large body of Irish literature and music: they look more inwards than outwards to the scenery.
This church is typical of the large buildings. They use the local granite for building material.
We love finding off-beat museums and a butter museum certainly qualifies! We never saw it mentioned on the internet and it was closed when we came by. With advance notice, they might have opened it up just for us?
Cork was a small, clean, interesting-looking city. Too bad we only had a day trip.
If you go to Ireland, you have to go to a pub. We selected these two because they look the way we think a pub is supposed to look. The food was always good in the pubs we entered. Since it was Christmas, none of the local musicians were playing. Ireland completely shuts down for Christmas. Even the trains and busses stop running for a couple of days.
We had some pretty gray days. It never snowed and didn't get horribly cold, either. We had been told that the dead of winter was sort of the "secret season". It isn't much warmer in the summer!
This churchyard is in Howth (near Dublin). Even though the church is in ruins (notice the missing roof?), the graveyard is still being used. This is about all the sunshine you will find in the winter this far north.
This is looking down into the harbor of Howth. It is a working fishing port and very popular with the tourists. Since this is about as "low" as low-season gets, we had the place pretty much to ourselves.
We found a radio museum on top of Howth. Jim had asked, almost at random, about a tower on top of the town. We went by to see the tower and found the museum. Since no one else was around, we had a personally guided tour.
The tower is a "Martello Tower". The design was copied by the British and used all over the world. It originally had a single cannon on the roof and was designed to keep the French from invading England by way of Ireland. There are a surprising number of these things scattered around the world.
If you mess up, you go to jail (or gaol if you prefer that spelling)! The town of Howth is quite proud of its fully restored jail. They use it for a tourist attraction and Santa was there, too.
This is the front of the Gaol. Many of the prisoners were actually shipped off to Australia after being put in jail for stealing food during the Potato Famine. Maybe not so much a punishment as a chance to get something to eat ...
Our friends in Scotland live in a town called Tane. This is the noonday sun.
This is the only distillery we visited. Ireland and Scotland both claim their distilled spirits are better than anyone elses. We didn't actually test that!
This is the 3 pm sunset in northern Scotland. The sun didn't get much higher during the entire day.
All in all, we had a very relaxing, pleasant vacation for Christmas and New Years.
