The First Week-ish

It has been a busy week since my last post. My early start class is well underway and rather enjoyable! I am learning a lot about Irish history and it is cool to know so much about the sites I’ve visited so far. We already went on our first field trip, a day trip to the west of county cork. The bus was scheduled to leave at 9:30 from campus and true to my usual form, I woke up at 9:21 and had to sprint the 15min walk to catch the bus. I made it just before the professor, but never got a chance to grab my morning cup of coffee. We visited four different sites, the first of which was a ring fort.

 There wasn’t much left of the ring fort, it was mainly an empty circular field with some ditches around it, but seeing as ring forts are the most common type of site in Ireland, it was pretty cool. The only thing to really look at though was the ditches. Next we went to a tower house from 1585, and because we were with our professor, we were able to see the tower house from the inside. The third site we visited was a semi-fortified house from 1616 called Coppinger’s court. The building was rather rundown and overgrown to the point where it was past saving but looked spectacular. The building wasn't very safe so we weren't able to explore it as much as others, but we did get to go into a few areas. The last site we saw was Drombeg stone circle. The site looked almost like a mini Stonehenge and was really cool. Plus the site was carbon dated to around 1000 B.C.  which is really, really old.

This coming week, we are taking one of our overnight trips to explore parts of Dublin and Meath. We are going to visit several famous sites and I cannot be more excited!

Yesterday, my roommates and I went to Blarney. The trip was so much fun and quite beautiful! Blarney castle was huge and had a great view from the top! And I kissed the blarney stone, so now I am supposed to have the gift of eloquent speech… we will see about that one.

That’s all for now! Cheers!