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Published: December 17th 2005
On one of my daytrips around County Cork I decided to go to a small town on the coast called Kinsale. This is a cool artsy town full of shops and well...artwork. I took the bus in the afternoon to the town center and walked around all day. It wasn't a very eventful day but it was fun. It was also a test to see what its like with a lot of solo time since I would be traveling by myself two months. I walked around town and saw
Desmond Castle where they held American POWs in the Revolutionary War. The shops in town were awesome. Some were art, some were good cooking, some were the weirdest imported foods and products I have seen in a while. They had candy shops, and chippers, and restaurants, and wool products. It was a cool Irish fishing town with an artsy twist. My favorite visit was to the
Giles Norman Gallery. He is a black and white photographer who does a lot of Irish prints but has also traveled to many other places to photograph as well. I highly recommend checking out his website (its the link on his name).
After that I went to the
oldest church in Ireland. Well, one of them at least. I think it was build in the 1100's. Inside it was pretty and old but the outside had one of the oldest, creepy looking cemetaries ever! Number one place I'd not like to be at night. In a way it was really cool to see the old graves and read what happened to people. Some were sea captains, some were priests, and some were other things I can't remember. : ) There was one grave that was for a 16 year old boy who died a long time ago. He sang for the church and was very loved becasue there many gifts and inscriptions on his grave. At the bottom they wrote: "he still sings with us, but from another shore." I thought that was really beautiful. I also thought it was interesting how much the grave stones talked about sailing. It is a fishing village after all, and long ago that would have been their primary income. There was a park next to the church that was for the sailors who died at sea also. Kinsale is one of the towns that helped rescue people from the sinking Lusitania
(the cruise ship that the German's sank off the south coast of Ireland, resulting in several chain of events including America joining WW1.) I think Kinsale was the closest town also but Cobh ("Cove") is not far off. Many of the victims were buried here in and in Cobh. It never left the people here though, its a tragedy that made an impact as there are many memorials in these small fishing towns, not to mention graves of the drownd.
I walked along the pier to look at the boats and, to my disgust, came upon the largest jelly fish I've ever seen. It was a big sucker and he looked mean too! I bet if I had put my head underwater you'd hear him hissing. I was pretty freaked out by this sight (I'd had a bad experience in the Carribbean the summer before which included baby jelly fish in my swimming suit...it hurt but they don't sting as bad as the adults). Anyways, after gawking at the mother of all jellies I walked out onto the pier and to my horror discovered that there were thousands, maybe millions of baby jellyfish in the water around the boats. I'm
not exagerating at all! They were tiny but they were everywhere; some were as small as the letters I'm typing. I think they were there because the water was warmer and there were schools of baby fish under the docks also. After that I walked back up and looked at the cute houses and the harbor before catching the bus back. All in all it was an uneventful day but a nice one.
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