Birr, another castle
Trip Start
Mar 29, 2006
1
78
232
Trip End
Feb 28, 2007
Birr,
Ireland
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Didn't get up till 9 am. We both slept well. Partly because it was gone midnight before I put down Ludlum's Bourne Identity. After breakfast we went to the information bureau in Banagher. Their office was situated in the oldest building in town called the Crank House. A strange shaped but very old stone building which doubled as a coffee shop, a solicitor's office and a youth hostel. We used the bureau to periodically send emails and make phone calls. There was an attractive German girl in charge who was very accommodating and let us stay on the computers for as long as we wanted for just 1 Euro.
I emailed Cor and Astrid in Limmen to let them know that we were close and to establish how they were to be picked up in Sydney
19th century telescope at Birr
. They had indicated that they had a friend who would do the honours so we had to let them know Stuarts email and phone numbers in order that they could arrange to pick up keys. In the end I left it up to them to work out themselves. Anne sent a message to Tracey because the phones in the town didn't work and neither did the phone in the house. She turned up at 11pm that night, would you believe, to say hello! We questioned her about the electricity bill that we were obliged to pay but she let us off because of the fuss Anne was making about some of the messy things in the house. We couldn't get the oven to work at first. It required the clock to be set but we could not work out the right combination of buttons. We also had to establish when and where to put out garbage. She said that she would pick it up on Saturday which I thought was weird. [She didn't!] As we were to discover the garbage collection was not a standard service. A householder had to pay a private operator to supply a licenced bin which was collected once a week provided the licence was prominently displayed. We didn't have a licensed bin. We lunched and then went out again to find the library. Anne paid a fee and empted the shelves. We continued on to a town not far away called Birr. At Birr there was a castle but it was currently occupied by the descendants of the Parsons family the lady of which was a countess so our fee only admitted us to the castle grounds
Birr Castle
. But it was worth it. They were very extensive. It took us a good couple of hours to walk around the formal gardens, the woodlands, the river, the lawns, the exotic plantation and the arboretum. In parts it was badly neglected...overgrown with long grasses and weeds...but then summer is causing a growth surge and maybe it had caught the gardeners unawares. It was actually very warm and was to get hotter later in the week. The best part of the estate was the old telescope on the castle's main lawn. It was built in the 1860s by one of the more scientifically inclined Parsons and at the time was considered quite an engineering feat. It was enormous. As high as a three storey building and still in use. [ I have no idea why commentators and the like use storeys of a building as a guide to heights of strange objects. After all who can really visualise three storeys high! Better to use something more familiar such as an elephant or a bus! Better still...use metres!!! The same goes for football fields which are oft used to describe vast areas of land. There is a huge difference between playing areas of soccer and Aussie rules football.] Around the castle was a dry moat and across the river nearby was the oldest remaining cast iron suspension bridge. Tea and coffee after and a look around the observatory museum.
We returned to Banagher via Shannon Harbour
Modern art (?) in grounds of Birr Castle
. A nondescript but cute village with two pubs, a corner store and a B&B in the harbourmasters house on the Grand Canal before it entered the Shannon river. Along the canal were tied up some two hundred boats. They looked like permanent residents homes mostly. We said a good evening to our cows who resided in the paddock opposite. On closer inspection they appeared to be bulls or whatever it is that comes somewhere between. They were great lumbering beasts with soft doe eyes but not a moo among them just a stare...like giant, horned Labradors.
For dinner we had chicken breasts and vegetables...very healthy. Nothing more than 1% fat content will be tolerated now. No sugar either. That means no chocolate. We watched TV and are now hooked into this stupid Poker Face game show. Another version of The Weakest Link really. Ant and Dec were the hosts. I'd read about them and now I had to watch them.
