Today started out rainy – typical Irish weather. So…combine the depressing weather with depressing Irish history. Our first stop was the Skibbereen Heritage Center, which happens to be across the street from our hotel. There we had an expert in The Famine tell us about it in depth. I learned lots of new historical things, like: the famine hit the south and west of Ireland the hardest; the current day population of Ireland is still several million below what is was prior to the famine in the 1840s; there was food in Ireland but there were so many living at the bare subsistence level that when the crop failed they had no money to get food; so many died that the carts took the dead each day to a cemetery near here and dumped them into a mass pit grave, covering them with straw until that pit filled and a new one was dug. Like I said, depressing history. It’s easy to see why the Irish psyche is still affected by this event. At the end of the lecture, James and Kort played their song, “Leaving for Cobh”, with lyrics relating to this time. It was hard to keep the tears away.
The rain started to subside as we visited the cemetery from this time, then we had a scenic drive to the coast with lunch at a pub in a lovely little town called Glandor. After lunch we went 3km further to an ancient circle of standing stones and an ancient cooking pit? Perhaps a bath? No one knows the purpose. At any rate, I leaned on one of the standing stones but was not transported to a prior century.
Tonight- live music in the hotel bar!