the last day of our irish pilgrimage! after another good breakfast at the newgrange hotel we pack once more and enter our pilgrims bus — which this morning has grown in size: morris, our excellent driver, swapped our smaller bus yesterday evening for a bigger one as he’s going to pick up a group of 50 at dublin airport right after dropping us off.

the final “building blocks” of our pilgrimage are kells and the hill of tara.

after a short ride we get to the little town of kells and disembark. first stop: the large celtic cross that used to stand in the middle of a busy crossroads but has now been relocated a little outside the town center. it’s been damaged — whether that damage originates with that unlucky encounter with that “cumbersome schoolbus”1 or has been inflicted earlier is hard to tell — but still interesting nevertheless.

from the cross we make our way up to the site of what used to be the monastery of kells and is now a normal church — a church with four high crosses and a replica of the book of kells, though!

next and last pilgrimage stop: the hill of tara — another site close to the river boyne. legend has it that tara was the seat of the high king of ireland, the árd rí na héireann. was is known as fact is that the hill of tara was the site of iron age hilltop enclosure as well as the site of a neolithic passage grave. the hill itself offers a nice view across county meath (including slane which we visited yesterday). its other prominent features are a tea room and two (2) souvenir shops…

the visit to tara concludes our pilgrimage, our next and final stop is dublin airport with most of our co-pilgrims flying back to frankfurt and düsseldorf in the afternoon, and with mrs d and i taking the aircoach bus into dublin as our flight back to zurich will not leave until tomorrow.

dublin airport is busy, and we just have moments to grab our luggage, say our “goodbyes” and then we are all of a sudden by ourselves again. after some initial trouble we manage to find the aircoach bus stop, buy a return ticket and are soon on our way into dublin city center. the ride takes about 40min (longer than the first time when we used that tunnel which the aircoach buses don’t).

our hotel, the o’callaghan davenport hotel is right around the corner of the marrion square north aircoach bus stop. the room is OK and we just drop our luggage off and make our way to trinity college to visit the book of kells exhibition.

we are, not surprisingly, not alone in our quest, lots of tourists (american but also german) along with bus loads of school kids. we manage to squeeze in and slowly make our way through the very interesting exhibition explaining the background of the book of kells but also how it probably was created. fascinating and well worth the money. also, a very nice closure of our pilgrimage

the library’s long room is nice but nothing to get really excited about: it’s a typical old library. i had hoped for more trinity college or even ireland related material to be on display but instead get treated to an exhibition about napoleon bonaparte. hmph.

after the cultural part we are in dire need of a tea and something to eat. following the recommendation of ms p we follow the signs in grafton street for the powerscourt shopping center where we have a very nice “high tea” in the old courtyard — any thoughts on returning for dinner are kind of squashed when around 17:15 the staff of the café start collecting the menu cards and closing down. on leaving we find out that 18:00 is closing time — worse than germany in the bad old days of the ladenschlußgesetz! and this is the capital or ireland!

our walk back to the hotel is interrupted and severely cut short by the onset of very heavy rain. luckily we do have our umbrellas with us, but by the time we reach our hotel we are still a bit wet.

being tired all of a sudden (anti-climax?) we decide to stay at the hotel for the evening and conclude our ireland adventure with a couple of pints of cidre and guinness in the hotel bar.

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1. according to wikipedia

The other Celtic cross was positioned in the middle of a busy crossroads until an unfortunate accident involving a cumbersome school bus. It now stands in front of a former courthouse, now a museum and coffeeshop. A roof protects the cross from the elements. Curiously, a replica is completely safe from the elements inside the museum.

a picture of the cross in its original location is available on this library ireland webpage. ↩