Our Travelers' Diaries
Writers, Myths, and Legends - A Journey to Ireland
Submitted by Lois

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The pictures around Galway yesterday were taken in the Burren, meaning a stony place: not much soil, but interesting ecologically, still. For more:
http://www.moytura.com/burren.htm

We also drove through the bogs, where peat has been cut for fuel for many years in Ireland. The bogs are constantly moving and changing, and make the roads wavy. More on bogs:
http://www.wesleyjohnston.com/users/ireland/geography/bogs.html

From Galway, we drove due East, back to Bray, County Wicklow, just south of Dublin. (Remember Glendalough?) Here's the map:
http://www.irishholidays.com/maptest1.htm

We stayed at the beautiful seaside Esplanade Hotel. Our room was in the front, overlooking the beach on the Irish Sea. I include a picture of our view. Also included is a picture of a home owned by Oscar Wilde's family:
http://www.esplanade-hotel.com/

We drove into Dublin on our last day to visit the James Joyce Tower. This is a Martello tower, built at the turn of the 19th century to protect from possible invasion of Ireland by Napoleon enroute to Britain. He never came. Oliver St. John Gogarty lived in this Martellow Tower and invited James Joyce to stay with him. They were so incompatible that Joyce only stayed for 6 days, despite the fact that he had nowhere to go! This episode is told in the first chapter of Ulysses, Joyce's masterpiece. I include to pictures of the room where they lived and of the view from the top of the tower. Quite murky...it just wouldn't stop raining!
http://www.dun-laoghaire.com/dir/jjtower.html

Believe it or not, people were swimming off this rocky area. The water temp. was 52 degrees F. The air was colder than that. There are other Martellow Towers scattered around the coast of Ireland. We also visited the Newman House, a part of Dublin City University, where Joyce went to school. Why didn't he go to Trinity College, like other famous Irish writers? Because he was Catholic and Catholics were not admitted to Trinity until the 1970s. Women were admitted around 1903 (if Protestant, of course). Newman House features stunning architecture. I include pictures of the beautiful plaster rococo carvings in the house.
http://www.goireland.com/scripts/low/xq/asp/areaid.1/areatype.i/cat.0/SubjectID./PremisesID.11302/qx/premises.htm

We also visited the James Joyce center where a young man gave an interesting talk about Joyce.
http://www.jamesjoyce.ie/home/

We were supposed to walk the entire city centre route of Leopold Bloom, the main character in Ulysses that day, but the weather was just too cold and rainy. We drove back to Bray, in hope of enjoying a walk along the seawall to the mountain in the distance, but the rain would not let up. It was in a pub in Bray that Bill and I found out that the Red Sox had won the ALCS and were going to the World Series!

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