Trip to Howth, the Fishing Town (as well as some random things)

Alive without breath; 

as cold as death; 

never thirsting, ever drinking; 

clad in mail, never clinking. 

Drowns on dry land, 

thinks an island
is a mountain; 

thinks a fountain 

is a puff of air. 

So sleek, so fair! 

What a joy to meet! 

We only wish 

to catch a fish, 

so juicy-sweet!

          Gollum's Song, from The Two Towers

Hello again!  Welcome back.  As promised, this post will contain the tale of my trip to Howth, which rhymes with "growth," and does NOT rhyme with "Meowth."  (That's a pokemon, for all you older people reading this.)  Before I go into that, however, I should address some other things.

Of great importance is a promised picture:

 

O'Connell House?  Or Hobbit Hole? 

By the way, all of the beautiful brick houses in Dublin (hardly any of them are actually houses anymore) have these beautiful colored doors with crescent windows above them.  Very awesome.  Mom, you would be stopping every few feet and exclaiming "Oh, look at the architecture!"  It's a very charming place.

Also a fun observation:

 

Just in case you're from a country where they don't drive on the left side of the road...  These are at almost every crosswalk.  They are extremely helpful. 

Now, it is time for me to tell you about Howth.  This will be very picture-heavy, just as Kyle likes it. 

In keeping with my current pattern, I am still about two weeks behind in this blog.  So, we took this trip  on Jan. 23.  It was a beautiful, brisk morning.  We took the bus to the train station with some other people from Notre Dame, who were going somewhere else for the day.  Here they are waiting for their train across the tracks from us:

 

 We soon got on the train.  Our group was six people strong.  Here's Allison, Kaitlyn, and Melissa:

 

And here's me, Ashley, and Ryan.

 

And so we arrived in Howth.

A little background: Howth is like a far suburb of Dublin, set on a little diamond-shaped peninsula to the north of the city.  It actually used to be an island, but because islands cause the waves to slow down and deposit debris behind them, a tombolo built up and created a connection to the mainland.  (Yay, I learned something in Geology last semester!)  It's primarily a fishing village, known for its fish and chips, but also known for its beautiful cliff-walks.  I had read a section in Rick Steve's Ireland guidebook about Howth (thanks Mrs. Wilson) and also the section about it in my Ireland guidebook that Tante Marie got me for christmas.  Both gave me some interesting ideas for things to do.  Of course I wanted to do the cliff walk, but I also wanted to see a castle, an old ruined abbey, the King's Footprints that are apparently carved into the rock at the end of the west pier, and the crown of Shielmartin, which is a ring of white boulders on the top of a hill that supposedly marks the burial place of an Irish warrior king who married goddess and became rich by raiding the Romans when they were in Britain.  The book Tante Marie gave me outlined a nice little walk that takes you by a lot of the sites.
So, when we arrived in Howth, it was very cold, and very, very foggy.  The cold was actually nice, because at this point I had scabies, and the cold numbed my limbs enough that they didn't itch very much.  We started out by going down the west pier and looking for the King's Footprints.  The pier was lined with little shops.  This is a picture from the end of the pier, and a lighthouse that was barely visible at the end of the east pier:

This is a very helpful sign:

We didn't end up finding the King's Footprints, but we did find a tourist information center.  The people there warned us not to do the cliff walk at the moment:  too much mist.  We might wander off the edge.  We thought that was good advice.  They gave us some maps and told us how to get to the castle and to Shielmartin hill.  It sounded like a good plan: follow the road back towards the train station, turn left up the first road, go on past the castle, then keep walking through a golf course until you pass through the rhododendron garden (not in bloom at the moment, of course).  They said there should be a clearly marked trail that would lead us to Shielmartin.  The maps even showed some hills and trails on it, so off we went, back down the pier.

Walking down the pier:

 

A boat! 

What is that in the distance?

 

 

It's a sea lion!  Sooooo cute!  I was so excited.  It was just hanging out in the water, looking at us.  His friend from far away swam over too.  They were so adorable... It was hard for me to walk away.  The rest of the group had to just start leaving without me, and then I tore myself away and ran to catch up.

On the way to the castle, our first stop, we saw an old church.  I don't think it was a special landmark or anything, but hey, it was cool-looking, especially in the mist.

 

Then we passed through some awesome gates.

Then, in the distance, out of the mist...

The castle!

It's actually a privately owned fancy restaurant now, so you're not allowed to go inside.  They've built some newer castle onto the older part, but we went and hung around what was left of the older part.

The old gate, I presume:

See the little door in the picture above?  Here it is up close:

 Ryan is actually standing inside this room with his face in the window, but it's too dark to see.

All in all, it was a pretty cool castle.  We kept walking, and we went past a golf course.  Not much could be seen through the mist, but it was pretty.  And there were actually people golfing.  Even though it was freezing, and there was no way you could see where the hole was.  Here's a picture of what we could see from the road:

 

We eventually walked past the "country club" building of the golf course.  In the back, we found...

The path! 

Almost immediately, we were transported into Middle Earth.

 

 This is where we planned to hide if a Black Rider came upon us (the rock sticks out, it's just that cameras give no depth perception):

The path was extremely beautiful.  Melissa was walking in front of me, so she got to be in a lot of my pictures.

For most of the first part of the hike, we were climbing uphill through a tunnel of thick branches roofed with leaves.

Ryan took a picture of us girls:

Pretty spider webs covered with dew!  Hopefully you can see them.

We were hiking through the forest, trying to find Rivendell.  I mean, Shielmartin.  Suddenly, to our left, a light appears from the heavens:

 

Was it the White Wizard in Fangorn Forest?  We went up to investigate.

There was no White Wizard.  But we did find ourselves in a small clearing, looking out over the tops of the trees.  Here's Ryan popping out from below:

Now I felt like Bilbo, climbing the tree in Mirkwood in The Hobbit to see if the end of the forest was near, and finding himself looking over an endless sea of green treetops.  But unlike Bilbo, I didn't see any butterflies.

A view from the entrance to the little clearing:

We continued on:

Soon, we came to the top of the hill.  Here's the entrance to the path, looking back:

It was still very foggy, and so this was our view:

It left us feeling like we had hiked to the middle of nowhere.  It was amazing.

 

Allison, Ryan, and Melissa: 

Me!

 

The top of the hill, fading away into the mist:

Another view.  Can you see Ryan?

There were also some pretty neat plants, including a little yellow flower.  In my head, I named it Elanor.

We spent a while exploring the top of the hill.  Eventually, the mist cleared a little, the sun came out, and the view got a little better.  Maybe we had found Rivendell after all.

 It was a somewhat humorous view.  The mist had given us the impression that we had traveled so far from everything... but in reality the golf course was still pretty close.

After we realized that we hadn't gone as far as we thought, we realized that we weren't very close to Shielmartin.  We tried to use the trails on the map to figure out where we were, but we soon realized that the trails on the map weren't meant to be directional:  they were meant to simply indicate, "there are some trails somewhere in the hills on this peninsula."  So, having very little idea of where we were, we tried to find the rest of the trail.

One of the places we found was quickly dubbed "the scary trail."  It looked like a place that a Black Rider might pop out of at any second.  Here's me, scared of the Black Riders:

We followed the scary trail for a while, but only found mud...

and then the path dead-ended into the little clearing we'd found before.

We went back to the top of the hill and tried again.  This time, we found another trail.  It lead us down the other side of the trail, through very different terrain.

 

We found more mud though.

  

Eventually we found a sign that said "National Loop Walk."  That trail was not on our map, but we thought it was a good idea to follow it.  At this point we had given up on Shielmartin, and just wanted to get to town for lunch.

 

 

Here's a view of the Eye of Ireland, a small island across from Howth's piers.  You can get ferries there in the summer.

Seeing the views, we knew we were going in the right direction.

This may look like a stream, and that's because it is.  It was also our trail.

The dew on the grass was frozen.  It was cold.  Good for scabies itching prevention.

The road goes ever on and on...

A beautiful, hummocky clearing, straight out of the Shire.

A view of the town:

 

Finally, we made it to the trail head.  There were many different "National Loop Walk" signs.  Too bad we had no idea what the different colors meant.

  

 We walked back into town:

It was unfortunate to discover, on this part of the walk, that people in Ireland tend to trash the nature around their houses.  Their front yards were neat enough, but any land on the other side of the road, which could have been beautiful little oases of forest, were full of junk.

We did find some other pretty plants though.

So with that, we made it back into town.  We were all very hungry at this point and so it was time for fish, so juicy-sweeeeet!

We wandered around for a while, trying to find the place that sells the best fish and chips in Ireland: Beshoff's.  While we were looking, we passed the sea lions again.  This time, people were feeding them fish from the pier.  No wonder they like to hang around here.

Note the flying fish in the top left corner:

We found Beshoff's in the corner of this building:

The fish and chips were really good.  Very juicy-sweet..  Especially after that long hike through Middle Earth.  The only downside is that they didn't give me enough ketchup for my chips.  But oh well.  I fed my extra chips to the birds in attempts to get bird pictures for Kyle.  So here's what I got, Kyle.  At first, a group of little brown birds were going for the pieces I was throwing.  

But as soon as I threw a big piece, a big black bird swooped in and nabbed it.

After lunch, we decided to go see the ruined abbey.

 

It was a very solemn place.  The first church on the site was built in 1042.  The present church was built in the 14th century.  Now, it's full of modern graves.  Some grave sites were waiting to be used, marked with new, blank tombstones and filled with fresh dirt.  It was an odd combination, the bright, new tombstones dotting the land around the ruined building, alongside gravestones so old that the names and dates were illegible.  

Here's more pictures:

 

Then it was time for the cliff walk.  The mist was pretty much gone, but I was pretty tired at this point.  Still, we had to do it.  We began our journey.  We walked past the houses you see below to get to the bigger cliffs around the bend of the land.

I took pictures of this person's backyard, which backed up to the sea, because it looked cool.

 

If you look very closely, there's a person wearing a red shirt fishing on the right side of this rock.  How they got there is beyond me.  It gives you a sense of how big the cliffs and the rocks are.  The pictures really don't do it justice.  The place made me feel very dwarfed.

 

Me and Allison!  It was very windy.  That's why I'm squinting.

 

Allison being silly, and Melissa, who wanted to take a safer approach to getting close to the edge.

The sun was starting to set, and the mist starting to come back.  We headed back down into town.

Our last stop before we left was this monument:

Around the bottom, on the plaques, were the names of different people who had died in the ocean.  Some gave the date of a ship sinking, others said the person had fallen from the pier.  A few simply said "lost at sea."  The inscription on the monument was beautiful:

The cross represents the love of God

The rope edge and shell motif, His nets.

The anchor reflects our dependence on Him

The rock... the safety of the land,

The swirling stones... the dangers of the sea

The 12 sides... the months of the year

The hooped railing... the rise and fall of the waves.

Then, in Gailic and in English:

Christ of the sea

Christ of the fish

May we be gathered in the nets of God.

It was a great tribute to these people who spend their lives, and sometimes give their lives, living in this town and fishing off the shores of Ireland.  Not the kind of public monument you would ever see in the states, unfortunately.  A beautiful way to end our day.

Before I go, a quick update on scabies.  I tried one round of extermination directly after this Howth trip, but it didn't work.  Two weeks later (that is, two days ago) I tried again.  At this point it doesn't appear to have worked.  I think I wore a pair of pants to church today that wasn't clean, but I've tried to compensate by re-applying the cream and hopefully I caught them all.  Those little buggers.

Phew, that was a long post.  Next time, the trip I took last weekend:  London!