After a full Irish breakfast, including black pudding, we
met Sean Patrick O’Rourke in the hotel lobby for a walking tour of Dublin city
center. We walked past the Royal College of Surgeons, a stone building that the
rebels had retreated to during the Easter Rebellion in 1916. Sean told us that
the rebellion had been led by teachers and poets who had first taken up an
exposed position in the middle of St. Stephen’s Green. The British Army then
mounted a machine gun on top of the Shelbourne Hotel and drove the rebels into
the College of Surgeons. Bullet holes still dot the stone façade of the
building. After six days, the rebellion ended and most of the leaders were
executed.
Sean then led us down Merrion Street and into Merrion Square
where we stopped at the Oscar Wilde memorial. Oscar was portrayed in a smoking
jacket with a sardonic expression on his face. The green and pink colors of the
smoking jacket and the grey of his pants come from natural rocks of that color.
A nude sculpture of his pregnant wife and another, more abstract, sculpture of
an anonymous man were part of the display.
We strolled to the west on Clare Street, Leinster Street, Nassau
Street and Suffolk Street to the Molly Malone statue. Trinity College and the
entrance to the Book of Kells were on our right. We paused in front of the Molly
Malone statue at the corner of St. Andrew Street and Suffolk Street. Molly is
known for selling cockles and mussels from her wheelbarrow while crying “Alive,
alive-oh!” Later in the day, we would hear the Merry Ploughboys sing the
well-known song about her. Molly was portrayed in a low-cut bodice, above which the bronze had been shined by admiring hands.
We marched to Dublin Castle, of which all that remains is a
round tower. The original castle was built by King John between 1208 and 1220.
The rest of the castle has been replaced by 18th-century office
buildings that now are used for the presidency of the European Union once every
seven years when it is the Irish prime minister’s turn to fulfill that role. Next
door are the castle gardens, a park below which lies the original “black pool”
that gives the city its name in Irish, Dubh Linn.
After we walked to St. Patrick’s cathedral, the largest
cathedral in the country, which is Anglican rather than Catholic, we confided
to Sean that we were ready to end the tour. We said good-bye to Sean and took a taxi to
O’Neill’s pub where we were directed to the carvery, a buffet line where we
could order lunch. I had steamed salmon and fennel with a side of “turnip”
(rutabaga to Americans) and broccoli. Abby had roast pork with a side of
chopped, steamed cabbage and au gratin potatoes. We drank Falling Apple cider
and Guinness. No one in that pub was drinking water with their lunch.
After lunch, it was a short walk to Trinity College, where
we had a 2:00 appointment with the Book of Kells, regarded as the greatest
national treasure in all of Ireland. The Book of Kells is an illustrated set of
the gospels, written on vellum in the 9th century. Two of the four
volumes were displayed, one of which contained the common genealogy of David
and Jesus from the gospel according to Luke, with illustrations of each of the
ancestors. After studying the Book of Kells, we proceeded up a flight of stairs
to the Long Library, the home of many dusty-looking books and some marble busts
of famous Trinitarians. A display of an early Irish harp caught my attention.
It is said to be the harp of Brian Boru, which is deemed unlikely, but more
definitely constitutes the model for the Irish harp that symbolizes Guinness
stout and lager.
We quickly found a taxi to take us back to the Fitzwilliam
Hotel, where Abby took a nap while I ran a few errands and worked on my blog. At
6:10 p.m. we headed over to the Shelbourne hotel for our rendezvous with the
taxi that would take us to the Merry Ploughboys pub for an evening of Irish
food and music. We rode with a mother in her 80’s from Surry, England, and her
three adult children.
The Merry Ploughboys is the only musician-owned pub in
Ireland. We were served supper, which in my case consisted of seafood chowder
with braised lamb shank and vegetables. Abby had the poached trout with mashed
potatoes and vegetables. Apple pie with a shortbread crust was served for
dessert. Music was provided by at first three and then four musicians playing a
fiddle, an acoustic guitar, and a bass guitar. Tom, the oldest musician, played
an Irish pipe and uilleann bagpipes. The fiddler had a fine tenor voice, which
nicely accompanied the baritone voices of the other band members. The middle of
the two-hour show featured Irish dancers, three women and two men, whom the
musicians referred to as boys and girls. On the way back to the hotel our cab
driver said that the taller of the two men was the number one Irish dancer in
the world. It was a great show, lasting from 8:00 until 10:00 p.m., and the
food was good, too.
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