Category: Historic Sites

Around Ireland: Kilkenny

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WHERE

Kilkenny is about 60 miles south and a bit west of Dublin, a drive of not quite 2 hours. We stayed outside town at a country estate, had a lovely dinner there, and then the next day spent several hours exploring the town on our own and with a guide. Kilkenny the town has a population of about 26,000 and the county a total of around 100,000.

Downtown Kilkenny
Limestone is a common building material

WHAT

Kilkenny is a market town and a tourist draw today, but its history goes back to before the 13th century and before the Normans came from France. For a time it was the capital of a pre-Norman kingdom and, for a brief period in the 1600’s, an independent Irish parliament made Kilkenny its capital. Alas, in 1650, Oliver Cromwell came calling, destroying much, and capturing Kilkenny for the English. There’s a historic castle (13th century) which with its original four towers was part of the defensive wall around the city center.

View of castle wall and remaining tower

St. Canice’s Cathedral, also from the 13th century, gave the town its name. Cromwell’s forces badly damaged it, but it is nicely restored. It is striking for its round tower.

St. Canice’s Cathedral

THE DAY

It was Saturday morning, and we were impressed with how lively and busy Kilkenny was. This is a town that has a an active business district. Lots of shops and restaurants and folks sitting outside or waiting in line for cafe tables despite it being a chilly morning. The locals were in T-shirts while we were bundled up in several layers!

Waiting for a cafe table

There were a few recognizable chain stores, but most were local shops in old stone buildings with attractive traditional signs. I didn’t see any neon or plastic whatsoever. We spent some time in an inviting and well-stocked bookstore and wandered up and down several shopping streets before we met Jason for our tour of more historic sites.

PRIDE book display in Kilkenny Book Centre

Jason is a local guy whose first career was as an electrician. When the recession of 2008 put him out of work, he started offering cycling tours. Today he owns a hundred bicycles and serves an international clientele, heavily American. He also has a fleet of water bikes, and renting one of these to peddle along the river appeals to the locals, offering him some insurance against events like Covid-19.

Guide Jason next to St. Canice bust

Aside from tourism, Kilkenny is known for its red ale which, Jason stated, is mostly drunk by people outside Ireland. And for hurling, an ancient sport that is sort of a cross between lacrosse and soccer.

Hurling team statue in Canal Square

Note: All photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).

On the Road: Greensboro, NC

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We spent Thanksgiving week in Carolina visiting family in Greensboro and then Chapel Hill.  It was lovely to see fall colors and to scuffle and crunch along in the fallen leaves.  Thanks to Ann and Paul, in Greensboro, we enjoyed several outdoor attractions plus a museum. Here are some of the highlights.

ATTRACTIONS

Greensboro Arboretum

Chimes in Greensboro Arboretum

The 17-acre Greensboro Arboretum combines paved paths for easy walking and a host of special plant collections ranging from conifers to hostas to a rhododendron garden and a shade garden.  For us in late November, little was in bloom, so what was most appealing were the tall trees holding on to yellow gold leaves.  Adding to our enjoyment were several sculptures, one tall one with chimes.  It was quiet and serene on a Sunday afternoon, and we only passed one other visitor.

Fall foliage in the arboretum

Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

Guilford Courthouse, a small village, was the scene of a critical battle in the Revolutionary War in 1781.  Although the Americans were defeated, Major General Nathanael Greene lost only a few soldiers.  Nearly a quarter of British Lt. General Cornwallis’ troops died in this battle, resulting in a change in course for the Southern Campaign.  Cornwallis was reputed to have said, “Greene is as dangerous as Washington.  I never feel secure when encamped in his neighbourhood.”     

Continental Army camp follower

The park’s small museum has exhibits describing the key players in the battle, figures dressed in the uniforms of each side, and facts about life in this rural area.  We watched a 10-minute introductory film which provided a very helpful animated depiction of where the American and the British troops were positioned and how the battle played out.  

Outside we wandered around the battle site noting the occasional sculpture or memorial marker.  It was an informative morning and much more interesting than I had anticipated!

Golden woods at Guilford Courthouse

Green Hill Cemetery

Opened in 1877, this large city-owned cemetery is full of history.  Many prominent families in Greensboro purchased plots here.  Many of the family plots are circular ones, a popular style in the 19th century, which allowed for a central piece of sculpture such as an obelisk to be ringed by individual headstones.  

View in Green Hill Cemetery

At Guilford Courthouse, we noted a pedestal dedicated to one of the founders of the military park along with the names of two other men.  In the cemetery, we wandered, took photos, noted some exotic tree species (Chinese parasol tree, for one), and found the gravesite of one Guilford Courthouse’s founders.  It was a lovely afternoon with splashes of sunlight, and the surrounding trees were especially beautiful!

Glowing fall foliage

LUNCH OUT

Osteria

Osteria is in a small shopping strip.  We had eaten here before with my sister and brother-in-law and were delighted to return.  Their menu includes salads, homemade pasta, and more substantial entrees.  Several of us began with the house salad or the panzanella and both were very good and good sized.  Their mushroom soup was also pronounced excellent.  I really enjoyed the strozzapreti pasta with creamy tomato meat sauce while others sampled fettucine with peas and prosciutto and gnocchi pesto.  Not only was the food very tasty, but it was also a good value!

BOOK SHOPPING

Scuppernong Books

A visit to Greensboro is not complete without some time to browse and buy in Scuppernong Books.  An independent bookstore with a café (offering wine), it both feels and smells like a bookstore should!  In stock are the latest fiction and nonfiction hardbacks, newly released paperbacks, and an extensive and well-curated children’s section.  In the back are two walls of gently used books.  

We browsed and lingered and even bought!  For the curious, the store is named for a Southern grape used to make a sweet wine.

Interior of Scuppernong (downtowngreensboro.org)

Note: All unattributed photos ©JWFarrington. Header photo is of metal silhouettes of soldiers at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.

Celebration & Reflection

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PRIDE AND MEMORY

This is the weekend that Gay Pride parades take place in New York, San Francisco and other cities, cause for celebration.   But, it also seems fitting to mention the relatively new New York City AIDS Memorial.  Located in the West Village at the intersection of W. 12th Street, 7th Avenue and Greenwich Avenue, it was just dedicated in December 2016.  Over the years, more than 100,000 New Yorkers have died of AIDS.  

The former St. Vincent’s Hospital (1849-2010), located here, had the first and the largest AIDS ward on the east coast.  It’s a hospital with a laudable history as it treated survivors of the Titanic shipwreck (1912) and victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911).

The memorial is situated on St. Vincent’s Triangle and consists of a circular water feature in the center framed by an open slanted metal canopy whose grid incorporates a symbolic repeating triangle pattern.  Inscribed in the pavement are words from Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself.”  The imagery is powerful, the place peaceful.

  

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Guesswork:  A Reckoning with Loss by Martha Cooley

I was immediately immersed in Cooley’s memoir and caught up in life in the small Italian village she and her husband retreat to for a caesura, a pause in their lives, of 14 months.  Cooley is on sabbatical and has a novel to complete, but she views this as unplanned time and space to reflect on the deaths over the past decade or so of eight dear friends.  Many of them died of illness too soon and others died by their own hand.  Alongside this reflection on lives lost, runs the thread of her mother’s fragile health and impending demise.  Her mother is approaching ninety and has been blind since Cooley was a child, but her blindness is an undiscussed, even un-referred to topic which puzzles this daughter.

The memoir is a series of richly detailed short essays which started life as journal entries.   You learn about the feral cats and the resident dogs in the village and about il professore who owns the nearby castle and is the closest thing to village royalty.  You get a sense of Cooley’s Italian husband and their warm and mutually fulfilling marriage.  You also share in her self-questioning and her doubts about her writing and her accomplishments.

Cooley is also a poet as well as a novelist and her writing is very lyrical.  She is attuned to nature’s creatures and to the sounds, or lack thereof, that comprise the fabric of this stretch of time.  I liked her inclusion of Italian words and phrases (some not translated) and of lines of favorite poets (T.S. Eliot, e.g.).  I admired her candor in describing relationships, particularly with her mother, calling it one of her FFFRs, fraught female familial relationships.  A lovely book in so many ways.

Note:  All photos ©JWFarrington except that of Martha Cooley from her publisher’s website.

On the Road: Onward to Bethlehem

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Recently, we spent several days in Potsdam, NY, at Clarkson University, my husband’s alma mater, where the president and his wife warmly welcomed us.  The fall foliage colors are late in arriving this year and most of the trees were green and yellow with just a few dabs of red beginning to appear. I strolled a path along the Raquette River at the edge of the campus and spotted a red maple leaf on the ground, about the only one I saw. The river was calm and serene.  Farther on, the path skirts the lovely and historic Bayside Cemetery with its impressive red sandstone gate.

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Since then, we have re-connected with family in Albany—first, second and third cousins and some one or twice-removed (love that terminology!)—and dined and visited with former colleagues and friends at Lehigh University in Bethlehem. We had not been on the Lehigh campus for eight years and it was a pleasure to see how lovely it still is (but, oh, the hills, I had forgotten the steep grade). We kept running into people we knew so got a tour the new science building, walked through the Asa Packer Dining Room in the University Center, and of course, re-visited Linderman Library.

Source: www.pinterest.com
Source: www.pinterest.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently, Architectural Digest included Linderman as one of the 12 most stunning libraries in the world!  I had the privilege of being involved in this renovation project and now, this library is the place on campus to study and to be seen. It even has a café—a source of controversy for some students when it was being planned! Hard to believe given today’s café scene.

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While in Bethlehem, we also visited the ArtsQuest complex located in Southside Bethlehem at the Bethlehem Steel plant which shut down completely in 1995 and sat untouched for almost twenty years. The complex includes:  SteelStacks, a performance venue, the Banana Factory, an arts center offering classes and exhibits, a Sands casino, and the headquarters of the local PBS station.  The highlight for us was the Hoover-Mason Trestle, Bethlehem’s answer to New York’s High Line.

2015-09-30 22.23.542015-09-30 22.22.34This trestle walkway, on the site of an elevated track used for moving raw materials, takes you along side the blast furnaces and sheds where the steel was produced. These are massive structures and being able to walk closer to them gave me a better sense of the immensity of the operation and the dangers involved in the work. Information panels line the walkway and tell the story of the immigrants who labored here, the women who took over during WWII, and the steelmaking process itself. It was fascinating!  What an effective transformation of these hulking edifices into an educational and fun attraction.   The trestle only opened a few months ago so many of our friends haven’t yet visited.2015-09-30 22.28.062015-09-30 22.24.53 copy2015-09-30 22.55.052015-10-01 10.54.52

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