Dublin to Belfast

Our tour included a visit to the biggest tourist attraction in Dublin, the Guinness Storehouse at St. James's Gate, early on a Tuesday morning.  The seven-story brewery building has been on this 50-acre site since 1759.

Sealed under glass was the original lease for the land signed by Arthur Guinness . . . for 9000 years; now that was a good deal!  The tour took us story by story up a glass atrium shaped in the form of a pint glass of Guinness, and included a survey of the four ingredients which make up this well-known beer:  water (from the Wicklow Mountains), hops, toasted barley, and yeast which is said to be the original strain developed by Arthur himself.

In the past it was thought that beer like Guinness imparted strength for the working man, and some of the advertisements on display (disputed these days by modern nutritionists) touted that quality.

At the very top of the "Pint Glass" was an observation tower and (of course) a bar.  I asked one of the bartenders where Howth Head might be located on the horizon, and he pointed out the direction.  I wish we had had time to walk on the fabled ground which is a focal point of Ulysses.

We left the Guinness Storehouse and continued north to Belfast, Northern Ireland, and as we left Dublin we passed the  beautiful Christ Church Cathedral.

Then we crossed the River Liffey again, and in a little over an hour we had left the Republic of Ireland and were in Northern Ireland.  This border, for those who have been following the Brexit issue, is not a "hard" one - one barely notices entering another country (our fifth on this tour).  But once again we were in the United Kingdom - Pounds and Miles, instead of Euros and Kilometers - and Steve gave us a nutshell history of the very complicated and often violent relationship between the two countries, referred to as "The Troubles."  After almost thirty years, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brought peace between the two countries, but feelings run deep and the fear is that the Brexit issue, and a "hard border," will bring it to the fore again.  One complicating factor, among many, is that there are 205 roads between the two countries, none of which has a gate or sentry.

Some of our travelers had signed up for a tour of the Titanic Museum in Belfast, one of the largest tourist attractions in the city, located next to the Harland & Wolff shipyard where the ill-fated ship had been constructed.

The rest of us were dropped downtown and enjoyed touring the downtown area and in its heart the beautiful City Hall, which looked more like a church than a municipal building.

In a Reflection Space room in the City Hall, I read this beautiful little poem on the wall.
 

ur next adventure was something that Steve later told us was, he thought, the highlight of the entire tour, which surprised me.  It was a drive by authentic Belfast taxicab drivers to see the Peace Walls.  Belfast is still demarcated by almost 100 of these walls that separate Catholic and Protestant areas; once serving as peace-keeping measures, they are now, after the Good Friday Agreement, an oft-visited tourist attraction visited by prominent world leaders (such as the Dali Lama and Bill Clinton) and ordinary people seeking to understand.

 

The cabbies drive the ubiquitous black cabs, seen also in London, and they proved to be informative in a way that an ordinary tour guide would not have been.  Down-to-earth, free with the use of expletives, witty and sarcastic, they have seen it all, and they did not mind telling us about it all from their perspective.  Four of them spoke in all, some Catholic and some Protestant.  The took us first to an area where large commemorative murals had been painted on the walls for the martyrs who had died here.

Then we drove to a section of the Wall itself, as intimidating as anything I had seen.  We could take a lesson in this country that others have already learned about the ugliness and futility of such walls.

There was graffiti everywhere on the wall, and we all spent some time reading it; some of us wrote on it.  One of the cabbies said, "Your Bill Clinton, aye, he wrote on the wall.  You know what he said?"  We fell for it of course:  "What?"  He grinned and said, "I did not have sex with that woman!"

I took dozens of photos of messages that I found, ultimately, to be messages of great beauty and hope and encouragement.  Like these taxicab drivers, I hope that, in the world of one anonymous writer, we can believe that "Where there is love, there is life."

It had been a long day, and we were rewarded to find the coach driving down a tree-lined street that seemed more residential than commercial, the location of our lodging for the night, the lovely Malone Lodge Hotel.

Dublin and Glendalough

A week ago, in Edinburgh, Steve had arranged for a young woman named Seana - a Trafalgar "local specialist" - to take us on a tour of Edinburgh.  This morning he introduced us to the Dublin local specialist, Ruth, who had a lovely Irish accent.  She told us about the Georgian Squares for which Dublin is known, beautiful row houses distinguished only by their different colored doors.

We drove past the famous statue of the reclining Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square; he appeared to be basking in the late August sunshine, as if ready to utter some witticism, as "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

Ruth told us that Dublin has recovered well from the 2019 recession; at last count there were 142 construction cranes scattered throughout the city.  One of them was even poised over Christ Church Cathedral, commencing a $9 million Euro project to replace the huge slate roof tiles.

We also saw St. Patrick's Cathedral, and the well from which he was supposed to have baptized 600 converts in the 5th century - very remarkable.  And we passed another famous landmark, the so-called Ha' penny Bridge, which has replaced a ferry that cost a ha' penny to cross the River Liffy. 

We crossed the Grand Canal and entered Donnybrook, whose name still exists today- "a brawl; a public dispute."  We who follow American politics closely are accustomed to this word!  But Ruth explained that the area we were driving through was the location of Donnybrook Fair, where horse racing had taken place (as it had since at least 200 AD), and thus the site of of many heated arguments over horse trading.

As we left Dublin, we drove into County Wicklow, often called the Garden of Ireland, with its rolling fields and abundance of heather and gorse, and then higher and higher into the Wicklow Mountains.

Here we  began to see hedgerows for the first time rather than the stone fences built in England.  Ruth told us that there were 300,000 kilometers of hedgerows in Ireland, separating hundreds and hundreds of sheep - there are more sheep in Ireland (5 million) than people (4 million).  The sheep here were especially prized for their meat, which is said to be flavored by heather.  We passed through several picturesque villages, and we were told that the BBC drama Ballykissangel had been filmed here.

 Our destination this morning was the remains of the ancient Monastery at Glendalough - the word means "Valley of Two Lakes" - an Early Medieval monasic settlement founded in the 6th century by St Kevin.  Its ancient churches and round tower are well-preserved.

Ruth pointed out that many of the graves were marked with stones having suns larger than crosses on the Celtic crosses; these early Christians were not unsympathetic to the pagans who lived here before them where the sun was worshiped.

I was especially impressed by the stone church, St. Kevin's Church, with its stone roof, built of corbelled stones, that does not leak.

At the exit to the Monastic Site, a woman was playing an instrument which I later discovered was the Uilleann Pipes, similar to the bagpipes but played with the elbow - very beautiful!

We returned back to Dublin and found lunch at The Duke; I had some delicious Irish Stew, with lamb that I imagined was flavored by heather.  We had plenty of time for touring Trinity College, founded in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I, which Joyce refers to in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:  “The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a great dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind downward.”

It had the opposite effect on us because it contained an exhibit of the Book of Kells, widely recognized as Ireland's finest national treasure.   The Book is an "Illuminated Manuscript," written in Latin, and containing the four gospels - a masterpiece of calligraphy and decorative art which I studied in my earlier years.  Every page is a work of art.

We joined a long line of visitors viewing the pages on exhibit at this particular time - no photos allowed, of course.  And then we came into the Long Room (ca. 1712), the main chamber of the old library filled with 200,000 of the Library's oldest books.  What a wonderful fragrance! - old books . . .

We had some free time in the afternoon to explore Dublin, so we wandered separately, as Leopold Bloom had, and Ulysses before him, through its wide streets and alleys.  I even spotted Finn's Hotel, which reminded me of the mythical Finn McCool after whom Finnegans Wake was named.

This young woman was writing something in chalk on one of the cobbled streets near Trinity, and I paused to watch her for awhile.  "There's only one earth. . ."  I thought it might be a plea for the environment.

An hour later I passed the same place and she had finished her poignant message, which gave passers-by a more realistic perspective, perhaps, on the romanticism of the homeless wanderer.

 "Never look down on someone," indeed.  Did I drop a Euro or two in her cup, as others were doing?  Of course I did.  She was a writer, after all.

Some of the others on the tour had opted to attend a show this evening, but we opted for something a little different - our first run during the tour (other than the one mile I had completed a week ago in Peebles).  So we quickly dressed out, and ran from our hotel down to a a deserted building called the Legionaries of Christ, a former novitiate closed because of several controversies that I did not completely understand.  But it was a good place to run, circling its parking lot several times.  Martha completed three miles and I completed two.

We returned to have a quiet, light dinner in our hotel.  Our server was a young man from Bangladesh, it turned out, who had just taken his exams and was awaiting the results.  "I have my fingers crossed," he said.  He was studying Business Management and his plan was to remain in Ireland.  "I think I picked the right country," he said, and smiled broadly.  We could not disagree.

Liverpool to Dublin

It was another beautiful day, Sunday morning in Liverpool, and traffic was already starting to get busy.  Steve played a CD of Gerry and the Pacemakers as the coach drove under the Mersey through the Kingsway tunnel.  The tunnel was opened to traffic in 1971, six years after release of the Pacemakers song and I assume the obsolescence of the Ferry.  We were on our way to Chester, another historic city 30 minutes away.

We parked in a quiet area near the downtown and disembarked from the coach, passing through city walls constructed by the Romans 70 AD or thereabouts into the older part of the city.

We spent some time walking along the walls, and I was impressed by how well they have weathered all of these centuries.  I know some walls in Highlands that have not lasted 50 years!

 We walked past Chester Cathedral , which dates from 1093 but was likely used as a worship site by the Romans at the time the walls were constructed.

Chester was just waking up, and we enjoyed walking down one cobbled street after another.  The city is known for its unique two-story shops called "The Rows," which we have not seen elsewhere in England. 

  

Steve pointed out this shop and its historic sign.  The house and shop were protected from the Plague in the 14th century, and its owner asserted it was saved by God's Providence.

We bought muffins and tea at a little shop and sat outside listening to a young woman with a beautiful voice singing a song I had never heard before.

We had been told to arrive at the square in the center of Town at noon to hear the Town Crier of Chester, one Dave Mitchell; Chester is the only place in Britain to have retained the tradition of regular midday proclamations at a fixed place and time, and Dave fulfilled his role with good humor and a booming voice.  I drew his attention because of my height (or was it something I said as well?), and I may have narrowly avoided being locked in the pillory (as opposed to the stocks) until sunset.

We crossed the border into Wales (our third country!) and noticed that the signs were written in both English and Welsh.  The Welsh language is alive and well in Wales and is actually taught in schools.  Its old Celtic language exists, and indeed the country itself still exists, because of its mountainous terrain, which made it easy to defend against invaders.

We drove past more wind turbines than we had seen before, and Steve told us that they now power one-third of the country.  I noticed, too, as I have before in Britain, that all of the cars are small and energy-efficient - there are no SUVs, and pickup trucks over here are rare.  That is because gasoline - "petrol" - is £1.30. - per litre!  That comes out to nearly $5.00 per gallon.  We also passed through the town in Wales made famous by having the longest name of any in the world:

 Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Roughly translated, that means "St Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the Red Cave."

Then we arrived at Holyhead port and boarded the huge ferry Ulysses, once the largest car/passenger ferry in the world. 

I thought of Tennyson's poem Ulysses:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

But I realized that I had the wrong Ulysses in mind when I spotted this large wooden carving of James Joyce, from a famous picture of the author, on the wall behind our seats.

Nobody seemed to know who this man was (I pointed him out to some Brits seated next to us), but he was an inspiration to me when I was a college student devouring A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.  How ironic (and I think he might have found it hilarious) to discover as I wandered through this huge ferry "Leopold Bloom's Lounge," a bar on, if I remember, the seventh level.

Bloom was the famous anti-hero, a Ulysses from his own time, who famously sailed the streets of Dublin in Ulysses, perhaps the most important novel of the 20th century.  The novel took place in a single day - June 16, 1904 - a date still celebrated in libraries and literary circles in various cities around the world by readings from the book, especially that famous single-sentence soliloquy by Molly Bloom, the remarkable climactic conclusion to the book:

. . .and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

  

All of this was a long time ago, I thought, a chapter from my academic past, but our fellow-passengers crossing the Irish Sea with us seemed oblivious to what the man whose face was carved in wood behind us had written more than a hundred years ago.  We talked to two men from the north of England about Trump and Boris, who shared some chocolate with us - "Have some good chocolate!" they said - and then a nice couple from Sheffield on a tour of their own who would be celebrating their 40th next year.  I browsed in the bookstore for awhile, where there were plenty of best-sellers but, alas, no Joyce.

I went on the upper deck and watched England disappear behind us, and in a little under four hours the rocky coastline of Ireland appeared before us.

We arrived to find ourselves in a country of Euros and Kilometers, instead of Pounds and Miles, and we began to learn a little about the complicated history of this country that has produced so many great writers, not just Joyce but W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney - what can account for so many literary greats originating from such a small country?

Our hotel was on a quiet, tree-lined street in the Leapordstown district of Dublin, originally "Town of the Lepers," a place where in the middle ages people with leprosy were kept outside the city to avoid infection.  We weary travelers were grateful for comfortable accommodations for the night.

Lake District to Liverpool

We had been on the road now with our fellow travelers for one week, moving from one hotel to another, and everyone had fallen into the routine of early rising, packing quickly, eating breakfast, and climbing into our coach.  Martha and I became very efficient at packing and unpacking when we took our Mini Cooper across the United States on a 30-day trip three years ago, and some of the others were practiced  travelers.  But I was surprised that there had not been late-comers or forgotten items.  Steve had a routine of personally checking all of the suitcases in the lobby, then he would count heads when we got on the coach.  "Have a little think, now.  Have we forgotten anything?  Mobiles, chargers?  Money under the mattress?"

This morning we entered the Lake District, which surely has the most stunning scenery in England.  We passed Levens Hall, a manor house along the road with famous topiary.  We have topiary like that in rural South Carolina, climbing up utility poles and overwhelming small outbuildings and junk cars!  But it looks a little more ragged.

We had an eventful day planned for today, beginning with a stop at the Haverthwaite Railroad Station and an authentic steam train.  The station looked like something out of an old British movie; one could imagine commuters with umbrellas and newspapers under their arms, waiting to board their coach for the city.  In fact, I learned an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot on BBC was filmed here.

The steam train was powered by a boiler stoked by coal, and while I was examining its complicated mechanism up close, Colin, one of our older Australian friends, seemed surprised that I had never seen one before.  “That’s all we had in Australia when I was a boy,” he said.

 

The entire railway is a heritage site and only runs 3 miles, from Haverthwaite to Lakeside at the end of Lake Windermere, and its top speed is around 25 mph; so we watched scenery slip very slowly past the window.  Residents along the way were out in their yards and smiled and waved at us.

Lake Windermere is the largest lake in England, more than ten miles long, and it was a perfect day for cruising most of its length to Bowness-on-Windermere.  There were beautiful vacation homes along the shore.  

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A crew of rowers was flying by in a racing shell, skimming as easily as water striders on the surface. And a mile or two down the lake, Martha pointed out another skinny-dipper, this time in water that seemed a bit warmer than the North Sea at Gairloch three days ago.  Is this the usual morning ritual for especially hardy (and exhibitionist) Brits, I wondered?

Martin had driven our coach along the shore road while we were on the railroad and the lake, and we boarded it again as soon as we arrived in Bowness.  We drove the short distance to Grasmere and along the way Steve pointed out what is officially known as the smallest house in Britain.

Grasmere was the home of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who was inspired by nature in his poetry, and it is easy to see why in a place like this.  He is buried in St. Oswald's church.  We went inside the church, and I was struck by the change-ringing ropes dangling from its tower, which I would have loved to have heard.

There was a beautiful daffodil garden nearby, in memory of one of Wordsworth’s famous poems, Daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

The final stanza of the well-known poem was inscribed on a stone near his grave.  Like many graveyards in England, it is a beautiful place, and I spent some time wandering there in my own pensive mood.

We ate lunch in the Grasmere Tea Garden, right on the river, and then stopped around the corner for a paper-wrapped package of Sarah Nelson's Grasmere Gingerbread, which is unhesitatingly called The Best Gingerbread in the World.  It was invented in 1854 by Ms. Norton, who came up with the recipe after considerable trial and error.  Spicy, sweet, and chewy, we snacked on it for the next two or three days, and we noticed several fellow-travelers opening their own packages on the coach..  

It was only a two-hour trip to our next stop, Liverpool, and our overnight stay at the Mercure right in the middle of the city, but it seemed like light years away from Wordsworth.  This was the home not only of the Beatles, but of Gerry and the Pacemakers, and we thought about their most famous song as we crossed the River Mersey:

Life goes on day after day
Hearts torn in every way
So ferry, cross the Mersey
'Cause this land's the place I love
And here I'll stay
People they rush everywhere
Each with their own secret care
So ferry, cross the Mersey
And always take me there
The place I love.

Our tour of the bustling port city began with the beautiful St. Andrews Church, with its soaring columns and high ceilings, and a magnificent organ so entirely different from the instruments played by the Pacemakers.

Its Whispering Arch is said not to have been deliberately designed for that purpose, but it did, indeed, function that way, a whisper across the room heard with eerie clarity, as if the speaker were an inch from your ear.

 

We also visited Matthew Street, famous for the many clubs, including The Cave, where the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and many other musicians of the 60s had played and first come to public attention.  Their names were engraved in bricks on a wall against which a statue of John Lennon himself slouched casually.

Of course, no visit to Liverpool would be complete without the obligatory visit to the statue of the "Fab Four" at Liverpool Pier Head.

For dinner, I decided to try that classic Indian-turned-British dish, Chicken Tikka Masala, which so many of my favorite British detectives have dined on at the end of, well, a hard day's night, and which does not seem to have yet reached the shores of this country.

What a long and winding road we have taken today, partly by steam train, partly by lake ferry, and partly by coach, from Windermere to Grasmere to Liverpool, from Wordsworth to Lennon and McCartney.