I have actually kissed the Blarney stone, htough everyone I know has said it was another case of carrying coals to Newcastle.

High up on the ruin that is Blarney Castle is a battlement I guess you would call it. There's a hole in the floor where it meets the outside wall. A bit over two feet square, the hole appears to have been a water drain. I'd not have been surprised to see a gargoyle on the outside. The shaft of the hole goes down not quite 3 feet, if I remember correctly, and now has a metal grating to keep you from falling 60 feet or so to the ground. Mya not be that high, but I have a pretty healthy fear of heights, so it seemed like a mile.

You lie on your back over the hole with only your hips and legs supported by the stone floor, while two accommodating gentlement hold your ankles, then raise up your torso to kiss the lintel stone at the far side of the hole. The men appreciate a gratuity, but only from middle-aged guys like myself. A young lady in a miniskirt who preceded me in this tourist rite got a whole lot more attention than did I.

I have one picture of myself standing outside the main entry door to the castle. Unfortunately the airline lost a small bag out of my bicycle box on the way home with about a third of my film in it. I had the pic taken and then changed the film, so I do have one picture from that part of my solo tour of Ireland. The gardens around the castle are actually far more impressive than the castle itself, which is no different from literally thousands of other ruins that seem to cover half of Ireland.

The most impressive I saw were the old ring forts, far far older than the medieval castles. The one on Inishmoor, one of the Aran Islands, is a semicircle on a cliff about 200 feet high. Supposition is that the waves washed away the base of the cliff and took the rest of the fort with it, though it's entirely possible the thing was built originally as a semicircle. Surrounding this fort are concentric rings of stones set like dragon's teeth in the ground, so close together that it's almost impossible to get through them. This was the prehistoric equivalent of barbed wire, and made a formidable defensive position almost impregnable.




TEd