little kid hurling, hobbit doors, and other tourist traps

I went with my friend Caroline to Malahide today.  It's a little seaside town thirty minutes north of Dublin.  It has a lovely castle, an awesome playground, and no bookstores because you don't have to read to be educated (according to Caroline). 
We arrived and it was a decent walk to the castle.  But first we got side tracked by one of the many tourist traps of the little town of Malahide - little kid hurling. It was pretty cute, all these little eight and nine year olds playing hurling when we took a wrong turn.  They were fairly good too.  Then we continued on and encountered distraction number 2, dogs! Dogs are very exciting when you miss your pets.

We continued on through the woods and eventually made it to the beautiful castle.  You couldn't take pictures inside so I compensated by taking lots of pictures outside and in doorways.  The tour was a pre-recorded audio tour (not a headset) that was played as you went about the rooms, queued up for when you entered each room. It was a little confusing and I didn't manage to locate a few of the items it pointed out, but generally it was pretty good. It had a nice soundtrack in the background and since it was pre-recorded, you could add your own commentary without being rude.  (The other two women on the tour with us were Polish and reading a translation so we weren't bothering them.)  There was a lot of brightly colored walls, a lucky wooden carving that the family hid from Cromwell, very ornate molding, pretty brass/gold (?) tables and chairs.  Apparently when you attended a coronation, you took home your chair as a souvenir; thus the house had a chair from the coronation of George VII (maybe, one of the Georges at least).  The house also had a really fine marble-in laid table the main dining room.  The guy who designed them wouldn't tell anyone his techniques, insisting there was only one God, and only one him.

Hobbit door! Note the bent knees.

We then went to the upstairs which had a few bedrooms and a bathroom.  Two of the bedrooms had outfits from the residents going way back, hopefully to the sixteenth or seventeenth century at least.  They were quite Santa-esque, being red velvet trimmed with white fur.  For whatever reason, the mannequin in the master bedroom had a head and was a fairly attractive mannequin with smoldering eyes, which was very funny in contrast to the old photo of one of the Talbots wearing the costume given the man in the costume looked about as attractive as a nineteenth-century Tobias Funke.

We proceeded after that down to the the Great Hall, which has a giant dining table at least twice as wide as my dorm room and a minstrel's gallery, very important for entertaining and often left out of modern day architecture sadly enough.  It had a giant painting of the Battle of the Boyne and tons of family portraits, as well as a portrait of Cromwell.  I thought both of these were odd as at least fourteen members of the Talbot family died fighting on the Jacobite side of the war (they suffered a significant loss at the Battle of the Boyne) and Cromwell dispossessed the family of the castle during his brief tryst in Ireland.  The guide lady told me they have to show the baddies as well as the goodies.  There was also a tiny peaked door in the far corner of the Great Hall for the castle's midget ghost (he's 4 feet tall), because ghosts need doors you know.  His name is Puck and he supposedly gets angry and appears whenever they try to alter the castle.  I forgot to ask how old he was (as in how long the castle's been haunted), but the last sighting was in 1975 so I guess he doesn't show up that much. He does however have a ghost owl that patrols the surrounding forests.


A small offshoot of the Great Hall is the library.  It was a bit tiny and lined with mostly old books.  However, there were some modern paperback books, infuriatingly enough, slyly stuffed in there to fill the space.  The most absurd of these was a book entitled The Gentle Art of Faking Furniture, which unfortunately calls into question the legitimacy of the entire castle.  Not really, but it was a still a really random and inappropriate book to have on the shelf.  I did really enjoy this castle though, and it was really cool that it was completely furnished.

After we finished the tour, we took some pictures in the hobbit sized door ways, and then ventured back along the path back to the train station.  We stopped to play on the exercise equipment and then in the really awesome playground.  It had swings and a rope Eiffel Tower, and a gliding swing-thing.  Obviously I played on all of these.

Playing at the park.

Rope Eiffel Tower

Castle 2.0

Then we took the path back through the forest and to the town.

Caroline as red riding hood

Malahide

A rare Irish squirrel.  I swear I've only seen two of these having been here for 3 weeks. Someone said St. Patrick must have driven most of them out with the snakes.

We looked around but could not find a bookstore and then returned to Dublin, at which point I took a nap.  But we also couldn't find the sea, and this was the second seaside town I've been to in which I couldn't find the water. I've developed a bad track record for that.