Final Blog Post Ireland—
Final Blog Post--Eric, Chris, Cavainna, and Riley
Monday’s class was spent learning a bit about the Aran Islands, our field trip destination for the following day, Tuesday. We watched a few minutes from an old film, Man of Aran (1934), which (somewhat inaccurately) shows what life on the islands was like almost a century ago. We also discussed Aran sweaters and some common misconceptions about them. The rest of the day we had to ourselves.
On Tuesday, we got up early to travel to the Aran Islands, specifically the largest of the three islands, Inishmore. Inishmore is the biggest and the most touristy of all the islands. We took a coach further west along the coast, where we then hopped on a ferry, which took us to the island. This left some of us a fair bit more sea sick than others. Once on the island, we boarded a tour van. The tour guide, a native of Inishmore, was friendly and informative. He drove us across the island, showing us everything from stone wall-plotted fields, to the town’s essential buildings (schools, bank, etc.), to beaches along the shoreline. We even saw some old, dilapidated monasteries. We learned from the tour guide that some of the Irish language is studied on the island. We think that it's pretty cool to have a separate place to study Irish for young people to learn the language well. However, perhaps the most exciting part of the day was when we went to this place called Dún Aonghasa which is an old hill fort built on the edge of an approximately 100-meter-tall cliff that overlooks the ocean. It was a very long walk up from the village where we started.
After the tour, we had time to check out some shops (including the Aran Sweater Market) in town and grab something to eat (including some surprisingly good lobster rolls and homemade fudge that was absolutely incredible) before heading back to the mainland.
The next day Cavainna and Riley split from the ground and wandered a few miles outside of Galway to the Athenry Heritage Center in Athenry. The Athenry Heritage Center was so much fun. We booked the Medieval experience. This allowed us to dress in costumes inspired by the era.
They had a diagram of what the village looked like in the 13 and early 14th century. In the museum, there was a recreation of what the medieval market would look like and examples of the most common trades. There were brief descriptions of the different weapons used by the different armies. The English had mostly refined the different types of arrows, the French had the crossbow and the Irish had many different spears. What we found most fascinating was the armor and padding. The armor itself wasn’t the most effective but we think everyone can agree that it’s better to have armor that works 60% of the time than none at all. We could not believe that a simple headpiece weighed a good 10 lbs.
The second part of the heritage center and, in Cavainna and Riley’s opinions, the most fun are the archery field, fairy garden, and the maze. Both Cavainna and Riley have always enjoyed archery and running through a maze in a gown made everyone's childhood princess dreams very happy.
