Kilkenny, Ireland - Thursday September 8th & Friday September 9th

After catching a train from Dublin to Kilkenny, Thursday evening, St, his wife and I went out for a nice dinner and just relaxed for the night. On Friday, St offered to take me around Kilkenny area to see a few interesting and historical sites.

Kilkenny itself was a unique town and when I was there Kilkenny was having a city wide party because the town's handball team won the national tournament just a few days ago. Through out the entire town there were these dark blue and yellow flags, and I mean every where. There were flags hanging out the windows, hanging from the trees and somethings string of flags stung from building to building across the street.

Tourist Train with the Town Flag

Beautiful Church in Kilkenny

On Friday the first place we went to was the Brownshill Portal Tomb. To many people this place has a lot of history and mystery. When you first see this area, it really looks like a regular field, with a walking path. Once you get to the end of the walking path you see a huge pile of rocks that looks completely out of place. There are no similar rocks around the area at all and many historians wondering how did the rocks get to this area. 

A portal tomb is so called because the entrance to the burial chamber is marked by a pair of tall portal stones and covered with a single massive capstone which rests on the portals and slopes downwards towards the rear. The capstone at Brownshill weights about 150 tons and is probably the heaviest of its kind in Europe. Most portal tombs were surrounded by a mound or cairn of smaller stones. Though no trace of this mound survives here. the artist's impression gives some idea of what the tomb might have looked like about 5,000 years ago.

Next in Kilkenny we went to Kilkenny Castle, which is a castle next to the river and a great tourist spot in Kilkenny. When you look at the castle it really has a great medieval time look to it.

Again the castle did not allow for me to take pictures. But there were many different rooms, in many different colors. The best place was the long room which has the name implies was a long room with a gorgeous white marble fireplace in the middle of one wall with very detailed carvings on it. All long the walls were many different portrait paintings of the pst people who once lived in the castle. It was amazing to see all the history.  And the view from the castle was great.



Behind the castle there was a large garden and park, where many people were playing and having picnics. There was also a beautiful water fountain and flower garden.

After a nice relaxing time in Kilkenny (St) drove me to the local train station so that I could get on the train to Galway, which is a beautiful town on the west side of the country.  (St) helped me get my luggage on the train and then I was off to the three hour train ride to Galway.