I have always liked architecture, so taking pictures of interesting buildings is a natural for me.
This is the Kilkenny Castle, in the rain, but with the sun at our backs.
The stone building is the Kilkenny Tourist Information Centre, built in 1582 by benefactor Sir Richard Shee to house poor people.
There are a lot of pubs on this block in Kilkenny!
This is St Canice’s Cathedral, in Kilkenny.
I found the Vicar’s Front door interesting.
On our drive from Kilkenny to Kinsale, we stopped at the Rock of Cashel. More on that in a later post, but this was a building right next to the car park (car park, not parking lot) that I found interesting.
Kinsale is a historic port and fishing town in County Cork, and the streets and buildings were really interesting. We walked around our first evening and I took the picture of the Tidy Towns sign. I found it so amusing.
Our first morning we went to the TI (Tourist Information) for Don & Barry’s Historic Stroll in Old Kinsale, highly recommended by St. Ricky. (St. Ricky is our spiritual advisor when we travel.) We had Don for our tour, and he was really great. He told us a story about how in the early 1980s one of the community leaders was concerned about the state of the town, and he wanted the town to clean up their act. He convinced them to enter the Tidy Towns competition, organized by a bureaucrat in the Irish central government. They needed to spruce up their gardens and to paint their homes and businesses. And they did. And in 1986 Kinsale won the National Prize in the Tidy Town competition, as well as other awards. We had noticed that the buildings were painted in exceedingly bright colors, and Don told us that the community leader who spearheaded this effort had an ulterior motive. His family owned the ironmonger (hardware store) that sold all of the paint!
When looking at the Tidy Towns Wikipedia page, I discovered that in addition to Kinsale, Kilkenny, and Kenmare (we visited lots of towns beginning with the letter K) also won Tidy Towns awards. But those other towns did not have as colourful of buildings as we saw in Kinsale.!
We had a nice lunch in the Milk Market Café.
Even the Post Office was painted nicely!
The Lord Kingsale pub in Kinsale is a olde building, painted in a traditional way. We had our first Guiness there.
We left Kinsale on the Wild Atlantic Way, and stopped at this church in Timoleague, County Cork. The wildflowers are nice.
This is Muckross House in Killarney National Park. No pictures allowed inside.
This is the view of the lake from Muckross house.
There is also Muckross Farms, a historic working farm with people in period clothing going about their daily chores. We enjoyed the farm, and here is a picture of one of the cottages.
Dublin had great architecture, and I am only posting a few photos. This is a pub called The Temple Bar, for which the touristic Temple Bar neighborhood is named.
The Temple Bar Laundry looks like it belongs in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.
Another Dublin Pub.
And another Dublin pub.
I took these pictures of the Royal City of Dublin Hospital on our last evening . I thought it was really interesting, architecturally.
More pictures to come!