Belfast City Hall, the Falls Road and the Shankill

The Tara Lodge breakfast was a very hearty, traditional (and filling) way to start the day for us - Rob even had a short drop of Irish whiskey in his porridge to "warm the cockles" of his heart on another cold morning here in Ireland. 

Belfast's city centre, with all its municipal buildings and major stores, is a short walk north of our accommodation, so we started the day with a visit to the city's extremely grand City Hall building. 

Built at considerable effort and expense around the end of the 1800s the City Hall stages an excellent exhibition of Belfast's past and present history in 14 rooms of artefacts, maps, photographs and text that really bring Belfast's colourful history of settlement, industrial supremacy and wealth, civic life, religious and class division, to life. 

Surprisingly there was very little information on the most defining era of Belfast's recent history, The Troubles - apart from a politics/detail free "Room for reflection" including heartfelt and thought provoking quotes like these ...........

We'd arranged to meet up with Maeve at lunchtime. Maeve being a friend of my friend Tania who is a Belfast resident and quite the history buff. She had offered to take us on a guided tour of the Falls Road and Shankill areas of West Belfast and talk to us about some of the complexities of Northern Ireland politics over the last 50 years or so.

After a long chat over lunch and a short bus ride we started our walking tour on Falls Road which borders a predominantly Nationalist and Republican (Catholic) community in Belfast. This area of the city was constantly in the news during the era of "The Troubles" for its bombings, guerrilla warfare and state of all out war between the British government and the forces of the Unionists and Loyalists (Protestants) and the Catholics of Northern Ireland.

There are murals all along Falls Road created by local artists reflecting on Nth Ireland's struggles  over the last half of the twentieth century and commemorating lives lost during the 25 years or so of The Troubles. 

Bobbie Sands and the 9 other hunger strikers in Maze Prison who gave up their lives over a few months in 1981, in protest, are a recurring image/theme in the Falls Road murals.

The black cab in the picture below before the famous Bobbie Sands mural is part of the Black Cab Tours company that offers tours of the area conducted by guides/drivers who were part of the groups fighting/defending freedom and justice on their own terms during The Troubles.

Maeve told us the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) is the much more radical offshoot of the IRA - and still going strong today!

There are memorials all over the Falls Road to fallen heroes.. it has the feel of a sacred place!

And a shop selling Irish souvenirs, Irish republican and revolutionary items!

The Falls Road Garden of Remembrance honours the IRA 'D' Company members killed during the Troubles as well as civilians and deceased ex-prisoners from the area.

Maeve talked to us a lot about the meaning and history behind the community driven murals before leading us to the famous International Peace Murals at the eastern end of Falls Road where it meets Divis street. Since March this year the wall has been devoted to messages of peace and protest about Israel's invasion of Gaza. It's obvious that the residents of the Falls Road area feel enormous empathy for the people of Gaza and their oppression by Israel. There were Palestinian flags flying everywhere along the road today.

Northumberland Street is the "no man's land" between Falls Road and Shankill Road. Every night the gates across the road are closed so there is no right of way between the areas. Tensions between the Nationalists/Rebublicans of the Falls Road area and the Unionists/Loyalists of the Shankill are considered so intense that night time crossings are still prevented.

Maeve guided us carefully through the (open) gates of Belfast's "No Man's Land".

Shankill Road has plenty of murals too - almost to answer the proliferation of community driven mural making in the Catholic zone.

This mural depicts the men of C Company of the Ulster volunteers - come to shoot you and blast you to smithereens ........

A view of the wall dividing the two communities - 6 metres high and around a kilometre long - and still in place despite the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended this so called Civil War.

More murals in the Shankill - celebrating links with Britain and the Empire and support for the state of Israel.........

.....and pride in King William 111 - the original Orangeman who established Protestantism in Ireland in the late 1600s.

The Shankill did not have a good vibe for us today - the public murals seem belligerent in tone to us and the adulation and celebration of the British Empire and militarism in general seem out of step. Maeve put it to us that for the Unionists/Loyalists its about pride in their British identity and culture and an unwillingness for that to be overtaken by Irishness! Such confronting messages given the context of Belfast's recent history!

It was nearing 6.00pm by the time we ended our walk today. We said our goodbyes to the wonderful and knowledgeable Maeve and made a date to talk with her again before we leave Belfast later in the week.

A detour to the parish of Magheraculmoney in County Fermanagh (Northern Ireland)

We had quite a big driving day today. We started in Dublin and ended up in Belfast but with a very lengthy detour along the way. Our first destination was 195 klm NW of Dublin - a fairly unremarkable 18th century stone Church of Ireland church on Ardess Road in County Fermanagh. St Mary's Church, Ardess is located 3 klm east of Kesh in the Parish of Magheraculmoney in Northern Ireland.

While this church would be unremarkable to many, for me it is quite remarkable because of its links to my father's side of the family. Our Ireland trip has given me the opportunity to directly experience a place of significance to members of my family around 180 years ago, at a tumultuous (and often tragic) time in Ireland's history.

The nave and tall tower of St Mary's Church have been dated around 1767, although there is evidence of an earlier building being on this site since Medieval times. The north aisle of the church was added in 1863. 

The marriage of my great-great-great grandparents James Hope and Catherine Robinson was recorded at this church on the 27th January 1835. Their second child Jane Hope, my great great-grandmother, was born in 1837. Her birth was not recorded at this church (although her older brother John's was). Jane Hope married my great-great grandfather Frances Heffernan (born in Dublin) in Renfrewshire Scotland before emigrating to Australia where their daughter Catherine, my great-grandmother, was born (in central Queensland).

Very sadly, my great-great-grandmother Jane, whose family came from this part of Ireland, died in her early thirties (around 1870) after giving birth to twins, no doubt in rough conditions, in country Queensland. 

Her parents, James and Catherine Hope, were married here in this church in 1835.
 

Obviously there are plenty of visitors like us to this church and its ancient graveyard - necessitating this safety conscious message!

This is probably a more accurate picture of the church (a view from the south) as it might have looked in my great-great-great grandparents' day, where the more recent addition of the north aisle is not so apparent.

With family names like Hope and Robinson it is likely my ancestors may have been descendants of the Ulster Plantation era of Scottish and English settlement in Fermanagh County. The names on the gravestones in the oldest part of the churchyard cemetery were all very Anglo too. Family names like Phillips, Thomas, Armstrong, Knox etc etc were the norm ....

There is such a lot of sad history in Ireland. As in the rest of the country County Fermanagh experienced its share of hunger and starvation during the Famine years 1845-1850, losing 25% of its population to death and emigration over those years. 

Sadly, there was a designated Famine Pit in the ancient graveyard at the rear of St Mary's Ardess. We learnt there were over 200 local people buried here, with nothing whatsoever to mark their final resting place, until relatively recent times. 120 feet long and 14 feet wide the parish's Famine Pit had lain derelict and forgotten for over 170 years. But there is now a memorial in place - designed by a local artist and model maker and opened at an ecumenical service here on 17th September 2000.

The inscription says, simply ...... "Within this Famine Pit Lieth the Unknown Dead 1845 - 1850".

I found our visit here today quite sobering. I don't know anything about the lives of my ancestors from Fermanagh County - and why they chose to leave Ireland for a new life in Scotland around 1840 (and subsequently Australia in the course of time) - but I'm glad they did! If they'd stayed on could they have been likely victims of the cruel Famine too?

We spent quite a bit of time absorbing all this and trying to imagine how things might have been for people who are so connected to me through my family history.

This was a view of the church from the West .......

The only picture we have of the interior of the church was taken through a very dirty window pane at the nave entrance.

I took a pic of the long road leading to the church and wondered if my great-great-great grandparents ever travelled on it, on the way to their parish church?

We saw this decaying stone cottage/barn near the road within a kilometre or two of the church and wondered if the Hope/Robinson family might have lived in or near a building like this back in the day?

I also took a few pictures from the car window of the passing countryside as we drove through County Fermanagh (the so called Lakeland of Northern Ireland). Like everywhere else we've seen so far - it's very green with plenty of sheep and dairy cows dotted over the pastures.

We stopped in Enniskillen for lunch, the largest town in the county, located between the Upper and Lower sections of Lough Erne. We wondered if the Hope/Robinson families ever had need to go to Enniskillen all those years ago?

I am lucky to have a historian in my family whose extensive research has enabled me to find this family link in County Fermanagh in Ireland. Jane Hope/Heffernan's daughter Catherine is our common ancestor. I am very grateful to cousin Janice C. for her generous help in this project.

We drove from Ardess eastwards to Belfast this afternoon - around 139 klms, arriving about 3.30pm. We settled into our Tara Lodge in the Queens Quarter and spent a while resting before setting out on an evening stroll around this lively part of Belfast.

We made it to Brú na Bóinne in County Meath

We had an ambitious plan for today - and it very nearly came unstuck.......

We'd managed to get two (very hard to get) tickets for a guided tour (today) of the UNESCO listed Brú na Bóinne, the ancient monument complex located in a bend of the River Boyne in County Meath about an hour's drive north of Dublin city. We'd even managed to pick up our hire car a day early from Dublin Airport so we could drive up to join our 11.00 tour this morning.

So with all our plans in place we got up early this morning and caught the first airport bus of the day from near Trinity College - catching the early morning light on the River Liffey in the process - and our first glimpse of blue sky since we'd arrived in Dublin three days ago. 

 

Waiting for the bus and looking forward to the day's adventures .........

We got to the car hire desk at the airport well before 9.00am - only to learn there was no record of our booking, neither the original nor the modified booking, and no record of our deposit payment either!! 

It took us over an hour and a half to sort that one out, thanks to the diligence of Emmanuel from Sixt and a lot of fast talking from Rob with Car Flexi. We did come out of it eventually with a brand new Yaris and all the paper work in place but no time at all to get to Brú na Bóinne by the appointed time for our tour.

We drove there anyway, with a few more dramas along the way at the toll station (and getting the car into reverse gear!). Miraculously we did get there in the end BUT over half an hour late! But lucky for us these tours start with an introductory talk and quite a long walk to pick up the small bus transport to the various tomb sites. Rob and I went into turbo run, walk mode, over two bridges across the river and up a small hill track - and made it on to the bus, panting, stressed and disheveled, with no water and no toilet stop, but WE MADE IT!! Not a bad effort for a pair of septuagenarians like us.  

Our first stop was at the awesome Knowth Passage Tombs which have been unearthed, gradually, since the 1950s (UNESCO listed in 1993.) These extraordinary monuments are nearly 6000 years old - older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza.

The mounds (passage tombs) are surrounded at their base by large curb stones decorated with engravings, the most extensive collection of Magalithic art in all of Western Europe.

The creators of these tombs (and places of ritual worship) had a highly developed knowledge of astronomy and science. Each of the tombs in Brú na Bóinne locations align markers of the winter equinox and solstice to illuminate art works and tomb interiors at specified times of the year..

None of the rocks used in the construction are found in this area - they were all transported here during construction. The quartz stones were thought to have a sacred purpose.

There are 19 small passage tombs surrounding the largest tomb at the Knowth complex. The tombs were for the rulers and significant families of these early settlements (people who came from Anatolia, apparently).

The view from the top of the largest mound was pretty amazing - no wonder later settlers used the mounds as fortifications.

The next stop on our guided tour was at the beautiful Newgrange passage tomb. As part of this tour we were able to enter the circular rock cairn (the cruciform burial chamber) at the centre interior of the mound - a remarkably small space considering the mound is so large, yet it was still quite intact in its original form - and intricately constructed. 

The rock at the entry to Newgrange is engraved with the very distinctive triple spiral design thought to represent birth, death and rebirth.

The views down the valley from Newgrange were spectacular too.

Our tour finished by around 2.30pm We'd been racing since we'd left our hotel just after 7.00am - no coffees, no breakfast, no WATER, racing at full speed and making our way on very unfamiliar roads in tight timeframes. Luckily there was food (and water) available at the Brú na Bóinne Vistor Centre and we attacked it with gusto.

We felt so happy we'd got to see the extraordinary Brú na Bóinne, with all the challenges we'd overcome in the process, that we rewarded ourselves with another stop at a village cafe on the way back to Dublin for more coffee and cake - what an amazing day!