Submitted by Danny Maney on the 2023 summer session program in Ireland…
This past week, we had a “free weekend” and a majority of the people I was with decided to go to the next largest Irish city, Cork. The main reason for going there was to visit the Blarney Castle, which apparently is an Ireland tourism staple. When we went, it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. The trip up to kiss the blarney stone was a must when we visited. One of our inside jokes was that we would rank all the castles we went to based on how hard it would be to siege them. This started when we went on a tour of a tower in Waterford and the tour guide talked about how they made the steps uneven so it would be harder to siege for a long time. Anyways, the Blarney steps would have been particularly hard to siege and it was this long spiral staircase that had a bunch of little doors to the different rooms of the castle. There was also a “murder hole” where I guess the castle dwellers would dump hot water down on invaders, I found it interesting that this was something of note in the castle. When we got up to the roof, the stone itself was a lot smaller than I expected it to be. It was part of the castle wall and when we went to kiss it, we had to bend backwards to reach it. I never really thought I was afraid of heights until that moment. There was a railing and there were workers to hold us up but the whole ordeal was quite terrifying. I can’t think of any American tourist attraction where something like that would happen. We also got to walk around the grounds after and it honestly didn’t feel like we were even in Ireland anymore. There was lush greenery that made me feel like we were in the middle of the jungle.
Another thing that we did in Cork was go walk around the University College Cork campus when no one was around. There were a lot of differences between this campus and UD for example. There was an art gallery that was open for us to wander around and was free. Also, we made it into one of the lecture halls and it was significantly smaller than the ones in UD. There was also a main green area which again was smaller than the one at UD. This campus was also very different from Trinity college, which is where we stayed in Dublin, mostly due to age. Trinity was founded in the 1500’s while UCC was founded in 1845. There was also a river that flowed through campus and it made for some really nice pictures. I found it odd that we were just able to go into most of the buildings, even though there weren’t that many people there. This would never happen at UD as I think that most of the academic buildings are closed on the weekends. We also got to see a cathedral and again I am absolutely in awe of the way churches are built here. A lot of the catholic ones were built more recently, as after the protestant reformation under King Henry the VII, all the old churches were seized and converted the Protestantism. The Irish Catholics really had a chance to build magnificent churches in the 19th and 20th centuries. (Submitted on July 18, 2023)