Brenna's Ireland: Archaeology Field Trip and first Irish football game!

Field Trips were always a highlight if you were able to go on one in middle school or elementary school. Very rarely do I expect my classes at Linfield to go on weekend field trips. At the end of March, my Irish Art to the Early Iron Age to the 8^th Century A.D. class took a two day field trip around Ireland seeing some of the most exquisite Celtic Art in Ireland’s history. Our adventure started early on a Friday morning when Emily and I left our apartment and met at the quad even before any alarms were thinking of going off in Apartment 27. There were about 25 people who went on the trip. I recognized some from the lectures but there were others studying Archaeology that the trip welcomed. We all fit comfortably in a smaller bus, not like the City Link or GoBus that we were used to traveling around it. When everyone was accounted for we headed to the center of the island to an old Monastery called Clonmacnoise. [Wiki Clonmaconise]. Irish High Crosses is an artistic motif that I have always been interested in. The detail of the scultpture has always been very appealing to me and I was really looking forward to seeing some of the first Irish High crosses known to Ireland. As we were headed there I noticed that the bus driver began discussing something with our professor and our bus was going very slow. I was able to pick up on that there was something wrong with the gas pedal and we were simply idling along the narrow and windy Irish, country road. Apparently the accelerator spring was not working and we barely chugged along until we got to this small little town. Emily and I spotted a sign for tea and being that it was still early for us, a nice cup of Irish tea would be a perfect pick me up. We soon discovered that this small little town had one of the cutest tea rooms I have ever seen. It was perfectly decorated with pastels and knick-knacks that gave the room an old-fashioned feel. Everything was a vintage-design and our tea kettle and cups were beautiful! We ordered tea for two and split a blueberry and peach pie piece. It was the cutest little place and we were beginning to be very glad that our bus was having technical difficulties. The old Irish high crosses weren’t going anywhere so we took our time and waited in the tea room until our other bus arrived.

We arrived in Co. Offaly only a little behind schedule and right away from the view of our bus windows we could see these interesting ruins on castle rock. In Co. Offaly we were visiting the famous monastery site called Clonmacnoise. Clonmacnoise was an important center in Irish history for religion, learning and trade. Many of the famous high kings of Tara and Connacht are buried there. There was a tall tower that had been there since the time it was founded in the mid 6th century. Clonmacnoise and these ruins sat right on the Shannon River. There was an old Irish Church that sat in the middle of the first section of the High Cross area. The was an archway door that had a secret trick that our professor told us about. If you speak into the side of the archway and you have someone on the other side with their ear up to the building, the sound travels up the arch and you can hear what the other person whispers. Emily and I tried it and it sure works! The weather was lovely and the sun was shining on us almost the whole time. Connor, our professor basically gave us an individual tour about some of the crosses and the iconography behind some of the reliefs on the large crosses. Many depict different religious scenes but mayn scenes are very old and ambiguous and there are many proposed ideas about what is being depicted on these ancient crosses. There is a lot of information I would have never known or details I would have never noticed about these crosses if Connor wouldn’t have discussed it with us. Connor Newman is actually one of the leading archaeologists in the study of Insular Art and he has many published works regarding some of the things we saw that day. He is a wealth of knowledge and it was great to get inside detail and information from a true Archaeologist. Emily and I joke that he is very Harrison Ford-esque in Indiana Jones (not as attractive as Indy but he has the archaeologist part down!) After learning about the crosses and main church ruins, he showed us the older cemetery and the new cemetery that is built on the grounds. Connor then led us through this small gate down this road to another small church ruin that had a great example of Roman inspired architecture. Of what remains has incredible detail but I was even more enthralled by my surroundings in this part. There was a small white cottage that was behind an ivy-covered stone wall and tall, green Irish trees. I remember thinking to myself that I could definitely live somewhere like this when I am older and retired. There is nothing more tranquil and calming than the Irish countryside. When you are in the country, you forget you are in 2011, it has such an older, traditional feel to it. After that, Connor let us lose to explore and go into the museum part of Clonmacnoise that had some reconstructed copies of the famous High Crosses. Emily and I decided to take our pack lunch down to the River and sit on the rock wall that gave us an incredible river front view of our surroundings. It was so beautiful and the sun was still shining on us as we ate our lunch in the peaceful spot we established as our lunch spot. We hadn’t established a meeting point but luckily Emily and I caught the bus before it headed off!

Our next stop was to some cross slabs at a Monastic Site called St. Canoc’s. Some of the cross slabs were very old and the designs were damaged. Some were intact more than others and you could see the cross design a lot more clearly. Connor explained a technique that Archaeologist do called rubbings in order to recognize what are on the designs of the cross slab. He brought white paper and crayons and we were able to do our own rubbings of the crosses. This was a definite highlight of the field trip for me. I hadn’t drawn or painted in awhile and I could tell that I really missed it. I did a lot of rubbings of different crosses and it was fun to discover the intricate details that the crayon unveiled. Connor had told us that there were three crosses that he was trying to figure out what was depicted. He gave us a kind of challenge to do rubbings on them to discover the relief. I had caught on quite well to the rubbings and was really enjoying it so I decided to try the rubbing on one of the bigger crosses Connor was talking about. After I had done the rubbing, Emily and I were looking at it trying to figure out what was depicted and Connor came up to us to have a look. He was impressed with the amount of detail I had captured and he even took a picture to use as in his lectures next year. That was kind of a neat deal and I kept all of my rubbings from that day. I was sad to leave my little art play time but we wanted to make it to Dublin before dark.

We got into Dublin around six and got settled in right away at our hotel. The hotel that we stayed at was very nice and definitely a step up from the hostels we had been stayed in. I have a friend named Michael that I have a couple classes with and he told me about a football game that was at a famous stadium in Dublin that night. It was Galway United against Dublin's team, the Bohemians. We met up with Micheal and his two other friends and split a taxi to the stadium to watch our first Irish football game. There were quite a few people at the game and the stadium was neat looking. The Galway crowd was small but mighty and Emily and I picked up on the chants fairly quickly. Before we knew it we were screaming at the top of our lungs and clapping as hard as we could when Galway would do something good or we were on defense. Micheal explained to us that it was early in the season but the Bohemians were at the top of the league while Galway United was lower down in the standings. When Galway scored the crowd went crazy and even those who weren't standing before sprung to their and joined in with the loud fans. This was nothing compared when the game ended and Galway United had beat the Dublin Bohemians. As a newcomer, you could just tell from their reactions that this was a huge win for Galway. The major fans who led all of the chants and songs even busted out a huge flag and flung it in the air when the whistle blew. My first and only football experience in Ireland was definitely and a good one and they even won!

The next morning we were checked out of the hotel fairly early and off to Trinity College to go to the Book of Kells Exhibit. The Book of Kells is an old Celtic manuscript of the four gospels of the New Testament that dates back to about 800 AD. The book is very colorful with artistic detail on every page. It was incredible to see the ornamentation of this Irish treasure up close. Also in this exhibit is the Long Room Library, that houses thousands of very rare and early volumes of books. The long corridor looks like a room straight out of one of the Harry Potter movies. You are just waiting for one of the head statues to come alive or the ladders on the bookshelves to move across its section. After visiting that exhibit, we met up at the National Museum Archeaology and History of Ireland. Emily and I had been there on our previous trip to Dublin but this time we got a private tour from both of our teachers on the details on some of the items we had studied throughout the semester. Seeing items up close that we had only seen on power point slides was incredible and knowing the history behind it made the items a lot more interesting. After that we walked around the streets of Dublin and grabbed a bite to eat at a small cafe. We met back up at the museum and headed over to the other National Museum that held some large copies of the most famous Irish High crosses around Ireland. Although these were replicas, seeing the details of sculpted friezes was amazing! Once again, getting to see these huge crosses up close that we had studied all semester made this field trip worth every penny. We headed back to Galway shortly after that after having spent the past two days seeing first hand some of Ireland's greatest artistic treasures.