K Cubed: Kilkenny, Kinsale and Killarney

---

Got up early this morning to get a good start to Kinsale, a little fishing village in County Cork that Rick Steves highly recommends. Mark looked out the window and said, “it’s overcast and it has been raining. Not raining now.” Well, that was an improvement! After we ate, showered and packed, Mark went to get the car while I checked out. Yvonne stood and chatted with me while we waited for Mark to bring the car around so we could load up and return the parking pass to her. I told her how much we had enjoyed her hotel and how warm the Irish people are. She said, “I’m glad you’ve met the nice ones.” I also told her that Ireland reminded me of what England was like 20 years ago with the green grocers and the butcher shops. I told her that I had worked in a green grocer on the high street in England when I was in college but that shop is gone now and replaced with a betting shop. “Oh, Bet,” she said, “ I’m afraid they’re 6-a-penny here too. It’s an old way of life going too quick.” We have noticed the Surper Val-U stores and the Tesco Superstores creeping in. It won’t be long until a way of life known for generations is no more.
We returned the parking pass (she told me she’d have to “hunt us over hills if we hadn’t brought it back,”) thank Yvonne and got on the road to Kinsale. We had found a round about at the edge of town that seemed to have spokes going off to everywhere but New York so we were pretty confident that we could figure it out from there—and sure enough, we could! We took a route (major rural road) to a national highway (national rural road) to a dual carriageway around Cork (!!!) back to a national highway (see above) back to a route (see above) then to what the Irish call a rural road. You can imagine. If the Irish call it rural, it’s rural. Because it was Saturday morning, we didn’t see any sheep on the road but I would bet that’s not uncommon. Luckily, Cork has an airport and we had to drive by the airport to find the road to Kinsale and, indeed, the international symbol for airport started showing up about 10 miles out. Only trouble we almost got into was when we nearly turned into the airport instead of passing it by. But we figured it out in time to do a quick turn and there we were, on the rural route to Kinsale. We had heard about a walking tour of Kinsale that started at 11:15 and our goal was to make it there in time. We wound our way (and when I say wound our way, I mean winding roads wound) to the town and then to the town center. We were looking for a church which has a large parking lot opposite it but we were having that right/left confusion thing again and finally ended up following signs to a car park. It was only a 5 minute walk down a steep hill but we figured we could find it again and it was a quick way out of town so that was a bonus.
I haven’t written much about Irish roads and Irish drivers so let me back track here for a moment. My mom had told me that the roads weren’t very good when she and my dad were here but she has heard they are much improved since that time. I am so thankful, at this moment, to have not lost my parents on Irish roads if they were worse then than now. Some things that one needs to know before driving on Irish roads:
• As I think I mentioned earlier, the solid white “don’t pass” line in the center of the road is really looked at more as a suggestion than a rule
• Streets are rarely marked with their name. And when they are marked with a name, in the next block, the name will have changed. We think that is because Irish history is so long and colorful. Most don’t earn more than having a block named after them.
• On all roads (National, Major and Rural), NO intersections are marked before you are upon them. So make sure the navigator has really good eyes and really strong neck muscles. The muscles help with whipping your head around and saying, “Oh, that was it!”
• Make sure the driver on all roads is very calm and doesn’t mind doing U-turns.
• Have a good map. When you get lost, your good map will help you find an alternate route. Just like all roads lead to Rome, there is no destination we have aimed for that didn’t turn out to have more than one way to get there. And we know this from experience.
• The Irish drivers are patient, kind, not aggressive (except that passing over a solid white line thing) and make the whole thing possible. Thank you to Irish drivers for not running we newbies off the road!
Anyway, found the tourist information office and right in front a crowd was already gathering for the walking tour. At about 11:00, this tall man with twinkling blue eyes surrounded by laugh lines and wearing a fishing captain’s hat showed up, carrying a shoulder bag and extra umbrellas. Barry Maroney came around and introduced himself to each of us, handed out umbrellas to those in need and right on time we started out walking. We stopped in park not far from the TI and he told us the story of the Battle of Kinsale. The abbreviated version is that the Spanish in 1601 wanted to take over the British Empire and the most strategic place they could find to launch an attack was Kinsale. They sailed up to into Kinsale Harbor and took possession. The British, of course, were much disturbed so set out immediately to surround Kinsale on land. Most Irish chiefdoms decided to stay neutral but two marched and surrounded the English. So you have the Spanish in town, the English on the hill and the Irish behind the English. But then, Barry said, something happened that would shock us all: the Irish couldn’t agree. One tribe wanted to attack, the other wanted to wait. Eventually, the one that wanted to attack did and the English army, though outnumbered, reined victorious. With the Irish defeated, the Spaniards were badly outnumbered so they got on their ships and went home. Now imagine, Barry said, what life would be like today if only the Irish could have agreed? We’d be speaking Spanish in London and it’s all because of what happened here in Kinsale. I quietly said to Mark, “Have you noticed that everywhere we’ve been there’s been an event that changed history in Ireland?” He said, “Or history in the world.” A woman in front of us started laughing. I guess she’d noticed too!
The walking tour was wonderful and very informative. After the tour, we went to the Fishy Fishy Café for lunch which Rick Steves highly recommended. Mark had the smoke salmon plate which was good and I had a fried shrimp thing that wasn’t friend shrimp after all. It was some sort of very strong fishy tasting fish fried prawn style. Not what I had bargained for. Not sure we would return to the Fishy Fishy Café.
We poked through the shops and took a quick spin through the Desmond Castle which, at one time, had served as the tax house for the arriving ships. We went back to the car to travel through town (two way streets with cars parked on both sides, barely room for one lane of traffic in the middle and a thousand tourists in town. Just imagine!) and out to Charles Fort, a fort built by the British at the mouth of the harbor to keep the 1601 Spaniard thing from happening again. The fort was very interesting, most notable because the chief engineers who were consulted about building it said it needed to be twice as big. The British army said nope and built the fort on its current foot print, an uneven piece of land sticking out into the bay. About 10 years after it was completed, it was attacked and, in very little time, defeated by Oliver Cromwell’s troops. Turned out the chief engineers were right: the weak point was the land side and to protect the fort, it really should have been bigger. Bummer. We took a tour of the site (in the rain for part of it--) and learned a lot about how British soldiers were recruited and treated through the years. In the 1600s and 1700s, recruiters would go into pubs, start buying rounds and then ask some drunken, unsuspecting sod to accept a days pay as a British soldier. As soon as he did, he was enlisted for life. I can’t imagine how he felt the next day—talk about a hangover! After the tour, we went to visit St. Multrose’s church which is on a site that has had worship services continually for 1200 years. It was a Church of Ireland church (Anglican) and we again noted the Millers and Butler’s buried within; no site of O’Gradys and Mulroneys.
We got on the road at about 5:30 to make our way to Killarney. I was not at all confident in the directions we had but they were the only directions we had so off we went. It was rumored to take about an hour and a half to get from Kinsale to Killarney and darned if that didn’t turn out to be true, probably because we were on National (rural) roads most of the way. We got into Killarney and I told Mark, “Go through this roundabout.” We did. Then I gave him the next direction and the next, figuring I was getting us more and more hopelessly lost with each turn. When I was sure we were never going to find our hotel, I saw a sign that said, Agadhoe Holiday House. I knew the town we were staying in was Agadhoe so I told Mark, “Turn around. That may have been it.” We did (plenty of practice at turning around, we’re good at this!) and sure enough on the bottom of a stack of signs was one that said, “Killeen House Hotel,” which is our hotel. We turned down this road and after a few jogs here and there, came to the most charming little country cottage hotel you could imagine. There was a bus parked in front and a few cars and we pulled in. We walked in the front door and there was no one around, though the dining room was busy. We walked into the lounge and back out again and this cute young man popped up into the reception window. “Right-o, can I help?” he said. I told him we were checking in and he said, “So you are but who are you?” The way he said it was so funny—he made us feel like we were arriving at the family reunion and he was a long lost cousin would couldn’t quite place the face. We told him our name and he introduced himself. Charlie took us to our room and showed us around and then helped us with the luggage, chatting the whole time. When he left, I turned to Mark and said, “Can we keep him?” He gave us a good suggestion for dinner in the town and we made our way there, only having to turn around once, a successful trip for a tourist in Ireland.
Killarney is a VERY touristy town. It is the hopping off spot for the Ring of Kerry, the Dingle Peninsula and the Killarney National Park. There are rows and rows and rows and rows of hotels and bus parking lots and tourist shops and the like and thousands of people speaking anything but Irish or English with an Irish brogue, which, yes, I know, includes us, thanks very much. We had dinner at a place called Laurel’s, Charlie’s suggestion, which was quite good, a half step up from pub food. We made our way back to the Killeen House Hotel and settled in for what Mark is already proving to be a very good night’s sleep.

---