A two room castle

Sunday I went with a couple of friends down to Dalkey, a seaside town 25 minutes south of Dublin, on the recommendation of someone who'd studied at Trinity a couple years ago.  Unfortunately, the sunny spell of weather has come to an end and it's been raining a lot starting this past weekend.  So we get to Dalkey around 1:15 and go to the main attraction, a medieval castle.  Except it's really tiny.  It's tall and everything, just more like a fortified and enlarged townhouse/storehouse than what you'd imagine for a 15th century Irish "castle" as it was billed.

It's the building on the right and that's really all there is to it

After ambling around the old abbey and the Heritage Center about Irish writers influenced by the area while waiting for the tour to start, there's a video which tells us just as much as the diagram on the brochure we were given after purchasing tickets.  Number one on the diagram of the building is an illustration of someone using the toilet on the second floor.  And throughout the video, my friends and I are suppressing our laughs at the ridiculousness of the video that takes itself entirely too seriously and advises us to explore the Heritage Center for our "merriment."

The abbey and graveyard

Then the tour begins and it's led by an actress in character giving us a tour of her "house".  She detailed the defense mechanisms such as the murder hole to drop boiling water on intruders.  On the second floor there was a nice fire place, set table, and barber's station.  She proceeded to have us practice medieval curtsying/dancing, demonstrated the stockades on a lucky lady from Tennessee, and have us sing to a man upon whom she pretended to practice blood letting and cauterizing.  I learned where barber's poles come from (rags drying on bloody barber's stick).

View of the abbey from the roof of the castle

Then another man came and showed us the long bow and took us to the roof to see more defensive mechanisms.  We proceeded to make obscene gestures and yell "hail the king" in the direction of the barbarous O'Tooles and O'Roukes from the castle roof.  It was a drizzily and overcast day which impaired the view of the sea and nearby hills.  Then we went back down to the main floor and all crammed into the toilet room, which still smelled like urine.  We also learned how sanitizing urine was believed to have been.

One of the actors

Anyway it was absurd and very amusing.  Though it would have been better had the weather not been so gray.  Afterward, we went to a cafe and then to a pub to watch the hurling final.  Tipperary won (upsetting Kilkenny, which would have been the only team in history to win five years in a row if it had won.).  It was also neat because we'd just been to Croke Park a few days before.

The tiny main street of Dalkey, a quaint town with really only one attraction.  View from the roof of the castle.