DAY THIRTY-THREE: AROUND KILKENNY

A little over a month ago, I thought castles were the exclusive property of the English royal family, or any royal family, as in "Who lives there?"

"The king."

And that's it.  

The past 33 days (!) have been in part a study in debunking that long-standing notion.  Castles are places for kings, queens, princes and princesses sure, but they're also places where armies hole up and wait for some fool's attempted invasion (those narrow windows?  designed so you can shoot an arrow at the enemy without being spotted) and, as we learned yesterday, religious centers teeming with bishops and monks, who sometimes spend part of their days making wine or beer.

Today's edifice, Kilkenny Castle, was built by one non-royal guy and then spent 600 years in the possession of a non-royal family, the Butlers, who, as far as I can tell, earned their last name by being some sort of elevated domestic workers and earned the castle by sucking up to an actual royal family, in this case the Plantagenets of England.  So impressed were they by the quality of their friends that their grand portrait hall is about half Butlers, half royals who visited them in Kilkenny over the years.  So complete was their alliance on the English royals that the head of the family had to abscond to France at one point, lest the Irish peasants glancing up the hill at the Butler's fantastic abode figure out where to aim their angry revolutionary spirit.

Fortunately for the Butlers, the situation eventually cooled and they could return to their castle.  They let it slip into disrepair a few times and then finally did some renos and additions in the mid-19th century, enjoyed the place for a couple of generations then finally moved out in the 1930s, again letting the place to go to seed until, in 1967, when Arthur Butler, the 24th Lord of Ormonde, sold it to the Castle Restoration Committee for 50 pounds.  You heard that right.  50 pounds.  You hear people talking about their "ancestral family homes," but in this case,  Kilkenny Castle, which was originally built by the Earl of Pembroke in the 1200s, was definitely the legit Butler ancestral family home, whatever the legitimacy of their claim as elites.

"Nice grounds! Have you seen a Titelist Pro-V?"

According to the photos hung on various hallways in the castle, which show workers shoring up crumbling walls and painstakingly researching carpet patterns to recreate the authentic look of the 1860s, the Butlers had really let it slide by 1967.  It took several years and lots of pounds and euros to bring it to the point where tourists would pay 8 EU just to wander around and look at its (impressively accurate) period furnishings.  "That's why the Irish pay 50 percent income tax," Peter O'Toole remarked today, drolly, after he and I watched a video about the castle while Sandra Bullock and Princess Grace strolled the grounds.

And what grounds!  Despite Grace's off-hand comment that the estate "seemed small for nobles,"  I calculated some 30 acres with a pond, a few fountains and one of the coolest and biggest expanses of green I've ever seen outside of a golf course (how enjoyable to walk it without keeping my eyes peeled for a ball I shanked off the tee).  We did the whole thing this morning after spending about an hour walking through a pottery fair, me mostly staring longingly at the streets of Kilkenny while Sandra Bullock decided which very small plate to add to her world-class collection of little plates back home.  

It did not rain today, which in its own way for us created a small conundrum.  Who knew how long the dry weather would last?  Should we capitalize and do every single outdoor activity available to us, despite an overall sense that today would be best for "meandering?"  We could do that distillery tour any time.  Maybe we should book that three-hour bike tour.

I should say here that while it did not rain today that does not mean that anyone, besides the heartiest and most deluded of locals (not the guy we met on the elevator yesterday who said, "Ireland is beautiful... and it needs a roof."), ran around basking in the sun today, clad in shorts, t-shirts and Crocs.  Today was cloudy, windy and downright cold.  "It feels like November," commented Princess Grace.

Off and on went my baseball cap and my sunglasses as I tried to find climatic stasis.  In and out of cute shops and art galleries, cute shops that were sort of art galleries,  converted garages and big rooms that looked like vintage high school gymnasiums but couldn't have been because nobody plays basketball over here we went, getting as much out of our Kilkenny Arts Festival experience as possible without paying a cover charge.  We idly considered actually paying a cover charge for one or another arts event all day, but never pulled the trigger.  

S.B. and P.G. going analog.

Around Kilkenny we went, Sandra Bullock and Princess Grace having made an unspoken decision to ditch their iPhones and rely only on the tourist map we got at the hotel, which had listed 24 separate historic sites.  "We'll do a loop!" Bullock exclaimed early with great enthusiasm, because nothing makes her happy than completing a loop, Grace nodding furiously a few paces away, absorbed in her tourist map.  O'Toole and I stumbled along in their wake, me trying to take in as much of the city as I could in one afternoon, him gliding in and out of galleries in eternal pursuit of landscape paintings featuring oppressive, overwhelming skies.  

Pedestrian bridges that at first seemed "so cute" but turned out to be "sort of industrial, but with really cute flowers" were passed; plans to "go on a bike trip tomorrow" were made, negotiated and then all but abandoned over half-pints of beer at Sullivan's tap room, where they've got the casual atmosphere, the beer, the wood pizza oven, everything but the life-affirming roots music.  Ditch the Rachel Platten, Sullivan's.  If you can't give me Steve Earle, at least throw some trad out there.  

Finally, after visiting but not forking over 4 EU to enter St. Canice's Cathedral, which blew me away with its tale of starting life in 1280 and watching as an entire city grew up around it, dedicated to the daily celebration of religiosity, we found ourselves in a beer garden, perched at a high table, staring up at a TV and trying to translate the All-Irish football match between Kerry and Tyrone into something we could understand.  The mashup of soccer, rugby, American football and... maybe basketball?  They have to dribble every three steps... left us no less fascinated for our bewilderment, though it did take us about 15 minutes and a third of our Hendricks and tonics to realize that the audio was from a Premier League soccer game playing on another TV.

Kilkenny loves the Cats.

It was fantastic, even though what I really wanted was to watch a live hurling match.  The Kilkenny Cats, perhaps the team in all of sports whose nickname has the best local roots (the term "Kilkenny cat" reportedly has its 17th-century roots featuring cruel acts by the hated Oliver Cromwell and even comes with a poem:

There once were two cats of Kilkenny

Each thought there was one cat too many

So they fought and they fit

And they scratched and they bit

Till (excepting their nails

And the tips of their tails)

Instead of two cats there weren't any!)

will be playing in the All-Ireland finals -- soon.  I'm not sure when, but it's got to be soon because everyone in town is flying black and yellow checked Kilkenny Cats flags, which is pretty great and makes me wish I knew enough about hurling to buy a t-shirt, which I won't because I'm enough of a poseur as it is.

Here are today's numbers, suitable for framing as always:

37 -- estimated percent of gift stores selling pottery in Ireland we have now visited.  Expect this number to rise when we get to Dublin.  And speaking of Dublin:

5 -- Irish people who've warned us to "stay away from Temple Bar" when we're in Dublin, including the woman who sat down next to us at the Hibernia Bar last night, only to abruptly get up a few minutes later when a stool at the bar became available.  Our hotel in Dublin:  The Temple Bar Inn.

1 -- Mercedes-Benz E190 2.3-16 spotted driving up Patrick Street today not sporting a California license plate reading WHA TH EL.  Miss you, Mom.  

7.2 -- distance in miles to the Ballykeefe Distillery.  At present, the plan is to tour the distillery tomorrow then walk home.  Weather pending.

1-18 - 0-18 -- final score of today's Kerry-Tyrone All-Ireland football semi-final.  Kerry wins and moves on to face Dublin in the finals on September 1.   Most Irish football fans' second-favorite team, I'm guessing, is whoever's playing Dublin.  

15 -- total days spent in Ireland so far without meeting a single ruined romantic poet.  Still hoping, however.

Let me get you up to date.  We've got one more day in Kilkenny and then on to Dublin (and the Temple Bar Inn).  After that we lose O'Toole and Princess Grace and it's just Sandra Bullock and me left to take on a week back in England, where this all started.  Can you believe we've got less than two weeks left?