Day 10 – Pilgrimage to Glendalough

August 5 2017

First, Happy Birthday to my mom!

We had a very basic itinerary today: travel back to Dublin and make one stop at Glendalough (glen-da-lock) along the way. Glendalough was my choice, because it was supposedly the site of a new distillery, somewhere near an old monk settlement, in some kind of acknowledgement of the monks and their early whiskey-making days. My company (soon to be ex-company) distributes Glendalough Irish Whiskey in Canada and in fact Anthony von Mandl, our owner, invested 5.5 million euros into the company. Mark Anthony has been pretty good to me, so I asked my boss if he could arrange a tour of the distillery. Well, it turns out there is no such thing. The whiskey is actually made in a distillery south-west of Cork, and not at Glendalough at all,  despite non-specific claims to the contrary on their official website. To date, the whiskey is made in southwest Cork, although a brand new distillery in Glendalough is underway (which makes sense now why Mark Anthony has invested so much money … Anthony gets to build something from scatch).

We (“we” meaning “I”) decided to go to the area regardless, because the whiskey promo ads look wonderful. Glendalough proper is an old monastic site founded in the 6th century and probably used as a religious retreat, for manuscript writing, farming, and religious pursuits. And, apparently, distilling alcohol (interesting, Glendalough sells a varietal called Poitín which is basically Irish for moonshine and despite their best efforts to make it sound fancy-pants, it’s still just moonshine, and it’s vile).  As for the sacred monastic site, it’s lovely, but also very very crowded. I’ve figured out that if your want your somewhat plain and inconvenient location to become a tourist mecca, you just have to call it a pilgrimage. People will flock from all corners of the earth to this one spot, despite the fact that there are hundreds of others like it within a fifty miles radius. Fortunately, apart from a longer drive along scenic (i.e. narrow and windy) roads, this didn’t take us very far out of our way…

The first picture below is of the tour groups about to flock to the site, and the second picture is the old cathedral with a bit of the extensive cemetery in back.

Back in Dublin, Jeff VERY gratefully returned the car (yay!!) and we cabbed to our fancy hotel. No knock on the guest houses and B&B’s of Ireland but there is something comforting about the familiarity of a chain hotel.

We had some time to spare so we went to see the book of Kells. This beautiful book is a transcription of the first 4 gospels of the new testament, and is ornately decorated by monks (I think) around 800 AD. Only a couple of pages of the book are ever shown at a time, due to it’s delicacy and rarity. One of the more interesting parts of the exhibit was a history of the town of Kells (we were there on Ring of Kerry day), a city that was desecrated numerous times by vikings, while housing the precious book, and then was ravaged by fire about a dozen times over 50-some-odd years. THEN the monks decided to hand the book over to someone for safe-keeping! The other wonderful thing about this tour is that you end up walking through the Long Hall library, housing 200,000 some-odd ancient Irish books. This picture is for Erin….

We had our best dinner of the trip by far, at the Rustic Stone. for Chrystal, I am posting pictures of my and Jeff’s meals. We both ordered cuts of steak that come raw, sizzling on a super-heated slab of volcanic stone. You are supposed to then cut the steak into smaller pieces to cook on the stone to your precise liking. Fantastic! We paired this with a Spanish wine that took a little while to open up and then was lovely!

On the way back to the hotel we encountered a small used bookstore that conducts readings of James Joyce novels. Jeff has been on the hunt for Finnegan’s Wake, and as we were peering it the window trying to see if they had any copies, a young man appeared asking us if we wanted to take a look (this was 9:00 or so). Turns out he was having a beer in the pub across the street and saw us looking. He works there, so he opened the store for us and found a copy of the book for Jeff! He also invited us to join him at the pub because apparently the store owner was there and “he is an expert on Joyce”.  We are currently having drinks in the fancy hotel bar deciding if talking about James Joyce is a good way to spend the evening. Haha!