More Dublin

It's been another very cool (13oCmax), cloudy day here in Dublin. So it felt just right to repeat yesterday's start to the day with a good flat white coffee and a bowl of warming porridge from the excellent 3fe cafe near our hotel.

We walked a bit over 2.5klms then to visit Christ Church Cathedral - a place of pilgrimage and a focus of Dublin/Ireland's often tumultuous history over the past thousand years. Originally founded by a Viking king in the late 11th century it was rebuilt by the Anglo Norman ruler (invader) Strongbow a century later and then enlarged in the early 1200s. The roof collapsed in the 16th century and the cathedral was left to disintegrate. It wasn't until the late 19th century that it was extensively renovated and rebuilt with funds supplied by the whiskey baron Henry Roe (no doubt inspired by the Guinness family restoring the nearby St Patrick's Cathedral a few years earlier).

The church is full of stories - Strongbow's role in the Norman invasion of Ireland, the significance of Ireland's own Magna Carta, the mystery of the lost heart of St Laurence (the patron saint of Dublin) and its recovery, and the role of the cathedral choir in the debut performance of Handel's Messiah (in the presence of Handel himself ) - it was all fascinating!

 

A copy of Ireland's own Magna Carta is on display in the church's extensive crypt.

There is a small section of the floor where the original thousand year old tiles that survived the collapse of the roof have been re-laid ........  The rest of the floor was replaced with new tiles in the late 1800s.

The roof collapse has resulted in the church walls on the right side of the picture leaning out around 45cm out of alignment (easily detectable by the naked eye!)

The heart of St Laurence is stored very securely now - after its theft in 2012 and subsequent recovery in 2018.

From Christ Church Cathedral we started walking closer to the River Liffey, back through the touristy Temple Bar area of Dublin .........

It was party central in this area - even at midday on a Saturday (on a Bank Holiday long weekend)..

Until we got to historic Ha'penny Bridge, a pedestrian only bridge over the River Liffey, built in 1816.

We were headed to Dublin's GPO Building on O'Connell Street Upper to see its highly recommended "Witness History" exhibition.

As if to reinforce the GPO's significance in Ireland's history of activism and protest (rebellion) we saw a group of enthusiastic marchers protesting the Israel invasion of Gaza as we approached the building.

A group of the marchers eventually moved into nearby Trinity College and continued their protest by dropping their flags and loudly chanting and banging drums from the building's windows. It was even a news item on tonight's news broadcast!

Meanwhile we got completely immersed in the excellent Witness to History exhibition, spending a few hours immersed in all the stories around the 2016 Easter uprising (based in the GPO building) and its significance to the tumultuous events that unfolded in Ireland over the next 80-90 years after that.

We found a lovely pub for a very late lunch afterwards... We had walked the streets around the city centre a lot today - all very crowded and quite intense: lots of loud party groups around Temple Bar, loud protestors in the centre of the city and crowds of shoppers and tourist groups everywhere. The streets were also full of buskers, bible bashers, loud lads and groups of shrieking hens party girl groups. We were ready for a break from all that.

We eventually found this lovely quiet pub in Chatham Street .... by now we were really ready for a very late lunch!

Luckily it really was worth waiting for - and no loud drunken people at all - just a lovely, old, traditional Dublin pub.

It was well after 4.00 by the time we were done so we decided we'd walk back to our hotel for one last coffee of the day before another "quiet night at home" (we still get really tired by early evening - a slight case of jet lag I think).