Ireland's Best Gravesites

Best gravesites? Sounds gruesome, I know, but Ireland has a lot of really cool "cemeteries." I've already discussed our trip to the Hill of Tara, one of my favorite locations in Ireland. Here I'll tell you about some other favorite ancient cemeteries and other sites we went to on our last days in Ireland. We started off our day in the wind and the rain hiking up a huge, steep hill called Knocknarea. I had to stop with the grazing goats on the side of the cliff several times and thought I wasn't going to make it to the top. We'd done so many hikes on our trip at that point and I was exhausted. When I did make it to the top, we found a few different burial mounds. The largest one at the top of the hill was a huge cairn, supposedly the burial place of Queen Maeve.

Our next stop, Carrowmore Megalithic Cemetery (5 euros), had even worse weather. We stood outside and huddled together during our tour, while a girl with a lazy eye and a miserable expression (I think due to the wind whipping her wet hair around her face) told us loads of historical tidbits about the cemetery. We walked around the whole place and even into a large burial mound. Even though we couldn't walk around the whole mound, we did get to go to a large chamber within it and watch a "virtual" tour of the place.

We headed back to Sligo to eat, despite the town being practically shut down the night before. We went to Osta Cafe and Wine Bar, which was a little overpriced and what my boyfriend would call "hipster." It took a while to get our food, and we were there at a weird time so we didn't have much choice for lunch as far as the menu goes. They sold a lot of treats and even some food from local farms (like blocks of cheese) at the check-out. It was an interesting cafe, but we thought it was a bit overrated. Right around the corner from the cafe was a W.B. Yeats statue. You might not be able to tell, but all over his clothes in the statue are words from the poems he wrote.

We stopped at Charleville Castle (8 euros) for a tour on our way down to Athlone, where our airbnb was. I was really excited about Charleville Castle (supposedly one of the most haunted castles in Europe), but the information I found online about their tours was very vague. There was one other car in the parking lot when we got there, and when we

knocked on the door we were told that a tour had just started and they made us wait outside while they asked the other guide if we could join the tour. They came back five minutes later saying the tour was already too far underway and we would have to wait forty-five minutes outside. We thought this was insane and inconsiderate, especially after we went on the tour and felt that we definitely could've just skipped the first 10 minutes of information. There was also a nice, warm foyer we could have spent those forty-five minutes in, but ended up having to wait in our car instead. The tour mostly took us around the mansion

and showed us the architecture, but it ended in the most interesting part, the haunted wings of the house. The tour guide told us how they have had seances and she has talked to the little girl that fell down the stairs and died, who apparently didn't think the butler was very nice (yes, that is the only memorable thing the little girl had to say). When we got back in our car we were a bit perturbed still at having to wait forty-five minutes, and our car wouldn't start- I had accidentally switched the key into the lock position and I thought we would have to ask for help from the weird tour guides. Luckily, I got the key to budge with a little more elbow grease.

That evening we found a parallel parking space in Athlone and tried to locate the restaurant I had picked, only to find that the restaurant was closed. This seemed to be a trend for the last couple days of our trip! We ended up spending a little more money than expected at a nice Italian restaurant, Il Colosseo. They brought us water and red wine right when we sat down and fed us a three-course meal. When we arrived at Hollybush BnB, we had no appetite, but our hostess had cooked us an apple pie as well. I thought she was asking us if she could cook us something and immediately said no, we're fine, and my boyfriend was thinking, wow, Mary is being mean to this old lady! He told me a few minutes later that she'd cooked the apple pie for us, so I corrected my faux pas and asked for some pie...

The next morning, we visited a monastery (Clonmacnoise) and some more ancient neolithic sites/cemeteries (Knowth and Newgrange). Clonmacnoise (4 euros) was crowded, even though we got there first thing in the morning. A bunch of elderly people had just unloaded from a tour bus. We joined some of the tours and explored the monastery, hearing a tour guide talk about a shrine they had made to commemorate the pope coming to speak at the site. We were glad when we left the crowds of Clonmacnoise, but later found more crowds at Knowth and Newgrange (13 euros). There was a long walkway through the Bru na Boinne Visitor Centre, and we had to get to the sites via buses. Knowth was an ancient city with several different mounds, and one large mound in the center that they thought had served as a village. We walked around on top of the mound, where the village supposedly had been, though it seemed rather small. Newgrange felt much larger than Knowth. It had one large mound that I got to explore, and on the winter solstice it is opened only to a select few people. There's a doorway with a window above it, and when the sun hits it just right during the winter solstice, it lights up the entire passageway. Apparently the sun rarely hits it just right because of Ireland's clouds, but I got to go inside the passageway and see a simulation of it. (Graham had to wait outside because the passage was too narrow for his broken arm.)

That evening we stayed at an airbnb in Dublin so that we could be close to where our tour took off in the morning. Our hostess was a little weird. I think she was originally from Spain or Portugal and spoke broken English with a strong accent. She asked us to take our shoes off and I slipped and fell all the way down the carpeted stairs in my socks. She didn't seem too concerned about that, though. I attributed her strange, laid-back nature to the odd smell in the house, if you know what I mean…

Total costs for Days 11-12: ~90 euros per person

Cost of airbnb: $88 in Athlone; $177 for 2 nights in Dublin