The Irish Heartland

     Kilkenny Castle overlooks the city and the Rover Nore.

Armchair Adventures

published July 15, 2012

by Paul Sullivan

The Rich History of Kilkenny

            On the morning of our third day in Dublin, my son, Tim, and I headed out of the city, intent on getting a glimpse of the Ireland we had come for.

            As so many cities have, this one had a 'beltway' to navigate but with a novel twist: tolls for using it were to be paid at service stations along radial freeways streaming outwards of Dublin. It worked through a series of computer-controlled cameras snapping images of every license on the toll road.

            If we had gone to Ireland for the narrow, winding country lanes, this 21st-century techno-stuff disappointed. Yet, as we would soon discover, that high-tech gimmickry soon disappeared.

            We would revel in many drives down narrow winding ways in the next few days. All that's needed to find them is to take the off-ramps into the past, down countless Irish lanes that even today are little more than paved paths for pony carts.

            That easy, unstrained joining of ancient and contemporary is one of the country's most engaging features. And the Irish themselves seem entirely at ease with this.

            Our immediate destination was Kilkenny, in the country's central southwest region in the county of the same name.

            Kilkenny's popularity as a tourist destination may stem from its appearance as the quintessential small Irish medieval city. Once we managed to deal with and work around the crowds it was a wonderful town, full of scenic cathedrals, friendly locals, pleasant little shops and all of it crowned by that architectural and historic masterpiece, Kilkenny Castle.

            The castle sits high atop a bluff overlooking the River Nore and the city's commercial core, itself appropriately aged to support the more prominent structures.

            We saved the serious sightseeing for the next morning and set off along John Street (could be called Pub Street) in search for food and lodging. We discovered the latter at a small B&B down an alleyway. If there is an Irish pub that doesn't serve decent food, we did not come across it.

            The choices seemed innumerable. We opted for a friendly place, nearly deserted, at the north end of John Street. It may have been for the service, as the young woman there could put a smile on anyone's face.

            Starved for food and news, we snagged a good deal on both and for stateside news, she bid me go behind the bar and use the computer. And the old news hound did just that, logging onto the New York Times to read headlines about the Supreme Court health care ruling. The 21st century certainly has its advantages!

            By the way, to continue momentarily along this line of digression, I do believe free Wi-Fi was, if anything, more widely available in Ireland than in most American towns I've been to. Got a smart phone? Don't travel without it, but be sure to bring the right charging adapter.

            Friday dawned gray and drizzling. We donned rain gear and headed for St. John's Bridge and Kilkenny Castle. Begun in the 9th century, this enormous building, like so many others, was not built over night. Instead, these Irish castles seem to go through a series of lives, expanding, being partially destroyed in some war or other, changing purposes and owning families over centuries.

            Not all guidebooks give you the straight scoop on these things. One reports that this stalwart stone eminence dates to the 12th century, but a guide told us where we could peer through a glass floor at a floodlighted section of a stone foundation dating to the 800s.

            But for practical purposes, most of the castle as it is seen today dates to the 17th century, when it was home to the Butler family, who ruled some 90,000 acres of surrounding Ireland and-essentially owned those who rented it for farmland. This, by the way, from some of the best informed guides I've ever run into. Tim and I talked to three of these historians separately, at length.

            And these were historians, carefully linking eras of British history from centuries past to the present. It was fun asking them to fit the fictional story of NPR's popular Downtown Abbey into the narrative of this castle and others like it.

            Nowhere in the Irish Republic are you likely to forget that the English ruled this land with an iron and often scornful hand for many lifetimes. It took little Ireland until 1923 to win the independence that we had won a century-and-a-half earlier.

            To this day, the Irish seem very fond of Americans. After all, in the great potato famine of 1847-49 and thereabouts, it is believed that a million Irish died and an equal number fled their homeland, most of them to America-an unthinkable toll for a small country.

            And just as Americans know from generational memories of their own Civil War, the Irish will long remember the famine and the generations they spent struggling for independence. 

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