James Joyce fans will guess, by the "7" or maybe the shape of the door, that I'm standing in front of No. 7 Eccles St., Dublin: the home of Leopold Bloom in the 1922 novel Ulysses, which used real Dublin locales as settings, many of them still visitable by Joyce enthusiasts. In 1973 the doorway was barely standing: the townhouse beyond it was torn down. (The doorway can now be seen at Dublin's James Joyce Center.) This was the spot in the city I most wanted to visit, and indeed the above is my first slide of Dublin.
But before Ireland I was in London for some days, and have a few pictures to show. I met up with a colleague from Northwestern, Frank McConnell, and his wife and two kids, and recall going out to Richmond with them to see Hampton Court Palace, of Henry VIII fame. Here they are, along with glimpses of parts of the Palace and grounds:
I remember walking the garden maze with them, so that's no doubt where the family-portrait photo was taken.
My other London photos are "singles" of various locales. For example, here is the steeple of Christopher Wren's St Mary-le-Bow (famed for its legendary Bow Bells) on the street known as Cheapside:
And here are a couple more City of London locations: the entrance to Leadenhall Market (an ancient marketplace, now a covered arcade):
And on Eastcheap, an especially extravagant Victorian Gothic facade:
Compare that facade with another front from several decades earlier: the home (now a museum) of the architect Sir John Soames, on Lincoln's Inn Fields. It's Neo-classical but with all sorts of subtle details that make it odd and interesting:
My only other London photo on this trip is of a park bench with a camel design. (I think the Tudor dragon at the right is part of something else across the street.)
When I went off to Dublin (I suppose I flew, since I don't remember a ferry crossing), it was to meet up with another colleague from Northwestern, Mark Coleman, and his wife, Cynthia. If I recall correctly, Mark was doing research there for part of the summer (he was an 18th-Century literary scholar). They showed me around the city and introduced me to Guinness on tap (creamier than any Guinness I've since tasted), while I dragged them to James Joyce locations. Right after my photo of 7 Eccles Street are two shots of the National Library, where in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen stands on the steps watching the birds circling in the sky. In the first, you can dimly make out Cynthia and me standing on the steps:
My next photo shows St George's Church, a Dublin landmark that had become a theatre when I was there (and has since become offices, I've read). No Joyce connection that I know of except that Bloom hears its bells ringing as he walks through the streets.
But next you see the strand where Stephen walks during the first chapters of Ulysses. (I don't know why I didn't take a picture of one of the Martello Towers along the bay, where Stephen lived.) I think that is Howth Head, the peninsula at the north end of Dublin Bay, in the background:
And here is the River Liffey that runs into the bay after flowing through the center of Dublin:
One day we made an excursion out to Howth, where Bloom proposes to Molly:
In the village there, I took a photo of a fishing boat unloading:
I can't identify the next two photos: maybe taken on our drive back into the city?
The next morning we began a car trip to the west of Ireland. Mark and Cynthia had planned an itinerary that would take us to Celtic crosses and other early Irish stonework, and I was excited to see William Butler Yeats' Thoor Ballylee, the Norman-era tower in County Galway that he lived in and made an important symbol in his poetry. After reaching the Cliffs of Moher on the Atlantic coast, we would drive south, where I would be dropped off at Shannon Airport for a return to the States while the Colemans continued their explorations. One sight that struck us on the country roads beyond Dublin was the caravans of Romani--people that others (including myself) in those days called Gypsies.
Our first stop in Galway was at Clonfert Cathedral, which has a fantastic Irish-Romanesque doorway dating from around 1200:
Next, it was Yeats' Tower, built alongside a stream. At that time the building was open to visitors, and we could climb the winding stair to the rooftop:
Another stop was at Kilmacduach Monastery, a ruined abbey famous for its round tower, supposedly the tallest (over 100 feet) of a fair number of medieval bell towers still standing in Ireland.
Crossing into County Clare, we visited Dysert O'Day, another ruined monastery with a doorway carved in the Irish-Romanesque style:
Adjoining this monastery is one of the medieval stone "high crosses" that dot the Irish landscape. We saw at least three during that day, including one in the middle of a cow meadow. The one at Dysert O'Day is known as St Tola's Cross:
Later we saw the Kilfenora Cross:
Toward sunset we reached the coast:
After finding a pub/inn to stay that night, we drove to the spectacular Cliffs of Moher, rising as high as 700 feet above the Atlantic waters, with the Aran Islands in the distance.
My box of slides with the Ireland photos contains four slides from another source: Mark must have given them to me as extras (i.e., redundant photos) that he took with his much superior camera. Here they are for comparison, with pretty much the exact same views:
The next morning we walked around the district where we had stayed overnight--a rocky terrain with old stone walls alongside the country roads. You can see Mark and Cynthia in the third and fourth pictures.
We stopped at another ruined abbey that morning, Concomroe, still in County Clare:
I took only one more photo on this trip--a shot of even rockier terrain, with what looks like a pen made of stone walls in the background. I would have liked to have seen much more of Ireland, but my flight was scheduled to take me back to the US. The day was turning out to be fairly sunny; previously, as you can tell by by most of the photos, the weather had been cloudy, often drizzly, and, I remember, in the mid-60s at best, in August. But it felt like appropriate weather for Ireland, and I had no reason to complain, having enjoyed the warmth of Italy and Southern France in the weeks before.
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