Breakfast of champions.

The next day we intended to go out, but never quite managed it. I insisted that as it was raining and we were drinking truly astounding quantities of tea, we weren't being lazy so much as we were immersing ourselves in British culture. We spent that evening with our host and some of the young German boys staying there with us, including Julian, who was brilliant, ethical, and spoke perfect English. I liked him immensely. We left the house only long enough to collect sufficient chocolate and beer to last us the night, and returned to play a complicated version of dominoes and a series of card games to which only one of us at a time ever knew the rules. I longed for a Set deck. The list of impractical things I wish I could have brought with me grows by the hour. Still a bit exhausted from the wanderings of the night before, I retired to a bed (and an internet connection!) in a room that I had all to myself.

A nocturnal adventure.

We'd been cheering for people as they only barely made their way onto buses, the tube, and trains all day. Agreeing that watching people run only to fail was awful, we offered sincere, unseen support for every sprinter to bravely fight through the cruelly closing doors of departing vehicles we saw. Some of them were truly magnificent displays of athleticism, too. Londoners are capable of impressive manoeuvres when threatened with the possibility of having to navigate the night buses, or even just waiting an extra seven minutes for the next prospect to arrive.

So perhaps she and I shouldn't have been too surprised that we barely made the last train leaving that night despite its best attempts to throw us off. Having claimed for over an hour to be arriving on the platform on which we'd deposited ourselves, the information screen changed its mind only once the train had already stopped on the opposite side of the station four tracks over, or up a fight of stairs, down a hallway, down a flight of stairs, and a ways across the appropriate platform. Corinne screamed, "Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

I shouted behind me, already halfway up the stairs, "Don't read the screen, run!" Unfortunately I'm a well-kept and bookish young thing, and she overtook me almost instantly.

We fell onto the train, barely missing the pool of vomit awaiting us inside the door, and laughing hysterically. Our dash had to have looked absurd. Those other desperate creatures moved like tigers on Vaseline. We were stunned porcupines slipping on something lumpy and far less pleasant.

While waiting on the platform, still ignorant of our fate, Corinne had asked nervously, "Do you think the tube is still running?"

"I'm sure it is. It keeps running, doesn't it?" Dear readers, at some point in the course of my eight or so years as a blogger, you may have noticed a faint, wafting underscore of hubris. Alright, listen. I'd not been in London for years. I'd really only been to London twice before this. Stop laughing at me.

Thus began a series of misadventures involving several more or less randomly chosen night buses, my insisting a great many times that the tube map really doesn't bear much resemblance to the actual shape of the city, and a great deal of wandering. We got to know one another very well.

One of the best things about our improbable meeting was that we could admit to one another the completely embarrassing things that we would never say to anyone save another American with whom we were travelling. The coins still remind us of Harry Potter money. I've spent months riding the buses that are significantly taller than the sort to which I am accustomed, taking at least two every day when I lived in Dublin. I confessed while sharing the top front seat with her for the half-dozenth time that riding on the top is no less exciting now than it was the first time. She taught me that French toast is called eggy toast in the UK, which I hadn't known, and is completely adorable.

We saw a drunk tourist get hit by a taxi, and tried to help lift her out of the street while cars piled up behind her and their drivers shouted. I was appalled. Who yells at an injured and crying girl for blocking traffic? I busied myself with assisting in useful ways rather than offering poetic and devastating admonishments, and I only regret my inability to have done both at once a little. We met two unpleasant and drunk Polish men, and a very nice stripper with an outrageously thick London accent who claimed to have only arrived in the city a month earlier. Together, using our superpowers of rage, feminism, and the stripper's impressive footwear, we chased the drunks away. By that time morning bus service had resumed, and we got back to Gareth's house just after five in the morning.

Snoop Dogg reveals himself as my Virgil.

The next day we went to the Horniman, which is one of those creatures that began as one gentleman's collection of things that interested him, and shortly after his death decided on its own that it was so extensive and fascinating that it couldn't help but become a museum. Although we'd been warned, Corrine and I hadn't entirely realised before going the extent to which it was a children's museum. They were everywhere. Miniature humans climbed on the benches, on the exhibits, on and in the fish tanks in the aquarium, on their mothers, and on my trousers. Even the crowds of babies not yet born, in their uncontrollable excitement at finding themselves in this place, kicked their poor mothers wildly from within their swollen abdomens. We found fish, masks, and musical instruments. I was thrilled to find the natural history section, which shared much of the delightful strangeness of the Wagner, even if it couldn't quite compete with the Wagner's dusty, dated charm. We learned about ritual and magical artefacts from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. I liked the African sculptures, little men made out of wood and filled with rusty nails. We learned about the European and North American used clothing that is recycled and becomes fabric that is sold as new in India, and about the Indian used clothing that is recycled and becomes fabric that is sold as new in Europe and North America. From the balcony that connected two galleries we watched a bit of children's theatre in the auditorium down below: a young boy was dressed as the emperor of China. One woman was dancing like a dragon, and the other as some sort of sneaky spirit. We agreed that they had the best job in the world.

While investigating Indian musical instruments, Corinne began to pine rather intensely for India, which is where she'd lived last summer. I suggested that we declare it India Day, that from the many Indian sections of the museum we march on to find Indian food, and then one of London's several (several!) all-Bollywood cinemas. This we did: we found our way to the Indian neighbourhood in which the theatre was located easily, although in more time than we expected it to take. We ate in a cheap South Indian and Sri Lankan restaurant that offered food better than that which she'd experienced in that part of the the subcontinent itself. Staying for dessert and tea and conversation with the servers, we missed the film we'd meant to see. We went for a walk while we waited for the late show, stopping in the shops and flipping through the imported records while she related gossip about Indian pop stars.

The film was called Singh is Kinng, and was a Bollywood musical comedy about love and Sheikh gangsters living in Australia and Egypt. I recommend it highly. During one of the dance numbers I noted the similarities between Bollywood and a certain brand of nineties rap video: Biggie Smalls would feel at home here. So during the credits, when Snoop Dogg was suddenly on screen rapping about the film we'd just seen, Corrine and I screamed and high-fived. It wasn't his best work, I'll admit, but his making an appearance made me feel practically clairvoyant. I've never been so happy to see Snoop in my life, and I assure you, I've been pretty happy to see him before.

London, a full house.

I arrived in London and made my way to the house where I'd be staying; it only required one hired coach, two tube lines, and a bus, which isn't bad at all, given the nature of the place. I imagine this would change after a decade or so of monotonous commuting, but as an occasional visitor at least, finding one's way through the city is one of my favourite parts.

The door was opened by a seven year old French boy. He was too young for any English, and as this trip has been reminding me with embarrassing frequency, I'm far too American for any useful French. I worried that I was in the wrong place, but I uttered the correct passwords: "couch surfing" and "Gareth," which was my host's name. Actually, I hesitate to publish anyone's full name on the internet even if they've already done so, but his middle name is Alexis, and his last name begins with Brink and ends with worth. Never in my life have I heard a name more perfect. His absurdly wonderful (read: British) name is, in fact, most of my reason for requesting to stay with him.

Theo, the young French boy, led me to the kitchen where I found a pretty Asian girl who, it seemed, could speak nearly any language in which one cared to greet her; the boy's mother; and another American. Gareth, I learned, was not home, nor were the other members of his family who lived there, but several of the nine other couch surfers besides myself staying in the house were. I considered leaving. But the French boy was funny, and gave me a tour of the house despite the fact that we were both left deeply confused by our attempts to communicate with one another. And the Asian girl, who is studying in Paris, was leaving for Dublin the next morning. She gave me her map, and I gave her advice on travelling in Ireland.

And I learned that the American, whose name is Corinne, is practically from my neighbourhood back home. She's from Doylestown, which is where all of my former roommates on Catharine Street were raised. In fact, she worked with Bill, and they were good friends for years. She was at my house once for a barbecue; I remember meeting her. She used to work at the other Whole Foods in town, so we also know some of the same people through that. More importantly, when asked where we are from, both of us respond, "Philadelphia," and a moment later, when we remember or when we are forced, we'll add, "in The States." Once we'd both said it and laughed and squealed a bit over the coincidence, it was obvious to both of us that it was true, that we are Philadelphians before we are many other things. I'm surprised we didn't recognise it immediately, her in her thrifted sweaters, me in my rent boy clothes. She and I were friends immediately.

Newgrange.

Newgrange is brilliant. It's a single mound, similar to those at Knowth, only much larger. It had been lost to history, thought only a natural hill and used as farmlands. Occasionally a lump of quartz would turn up there, and when the Scottish landlord who owned the place decided to begin mining for the stuff, Newgrange itself must have cried out and revealed itself. The first men to touch shovel to earth there dug directly to that famous entrance stone, to those carvings, and stopped immediately. They knew that what they had found was very old, and very important.

The place has since been restored to what a pile of important academics assure us is very near its original state. It's ringed in skull sized lumps of quartz, shining and white, interspersed occasionally with slightly smaller dark stones in a set pattern. Like at Dowth, the base is haloed with boulders, some of them marked.

The door is guarded by that stone, by spirals and hatches. It's huge and perfect. It could be a map of the Boyne Valley, the fertile river-ringed island contained within Ireland, the spirals marking out Newgrange and Knowth and Dowth, the other shapes representing the surrounding farmland. It could be a map for the souls of the dead entombed there to follow. I'd been to Newgrange once before with my mother and my grandmother. I'm glad to have been allowed to touch it twice. There is a door for humans there, wide like a cave's mouth, and there is a door for the sun, smaller and located above your head. If you don't kneel a bit when entering you'll whack your head on the bottom of its stone frame. I did, in fact, after expressly being warned not to do so. My hat suffered the worst of the blow, but I took the hint and assumed the correct ritual posture.

The ceiling as you enter the long corridor is low, and the walls press close, more narrow near your head. Busy stooping, forced to keep bowing to the place, you do not notice the strong slant in the floor, that in fact you are climbing up. By the time the interior opens into what seems after your crawl an expansive cavern, your feet are precisely level with the sun's door. Both are also level with the horizon as viewed in the distance from the entrance. You're standing underground; you're standing where the earth meets the sky.

Newgrange is five-thousand years old, older by five-hundred years than the Egyptian pyramids. The ceiling of the central chambers is shaped a bit like a beehive rising high above your head, and corbelled, which is to say pieced together with flat stones piled atop one another and fitted together. No mortar was used. The construction was precise: in all that time, cradled by a river and sleeping under weeping Irish skies, it's not leaked once. Lost to us for who knows how long, the interior did not require reconstruction.

Newgrange is cruciform in shape: the stone hall leads to chambers, one before you, one to your left, and one to your right. The carvings inside those spaces are varied. The rooms to your left and right as you enter are covered in them; the one directly before you bares only that triple spiral, beloved but almost a secret placed where it is, to the right of the entrance and facing inward.

Newgrange was there well before the people who first sang the mythologies of Ireland arrived, and ages before the monks eventually stumbled in to record them. So the mythology cannot tell us what Newgrange meant to the builders, but it can tell us something of what it meant to their successors.

Boann had a husband, Nechtan. But she was beautiful, and the Dagda wanted her. So the Dagda gathered his trickery, and sent Nechtan on a journey. And he called up his magic, and he hid himself and Boann in space, within Newgrange, and in time: he built a year in which they could lie together, and he hid it within a single day. They had time enough for one another then, and time enough even to birth a child. The Dagda left at the end of the year, and Nechtan came back at the end of the day, and he was none the wiser.

The son was named Aengus. Through some accident, he was left with no inheritance, so he asked his father for use of Newgrange for a day and a night. Through certain grammatical coincidences in the Irish language, however, "a day and a night" and "day and night" are both described by the same phrase. Therefore, in asking for a short lease, he was also making the place his for all of eternity.

It's about light and dark. It's a time machine that runs on trickery and clever words.

On the winter solstice, at sunrise, a beam of light penetrates the door built for it. It makes its way slowly up the corridor, finally illuminating all three chambers in a way that doesn't quite make sense.

I have two tattoos: a labyrinth on my left shoulder, and a church window on my right arm, shoulder to elbow. My body was built to imitate these structures: spirals carved in the earth; light shining through stone; the sacred reaching into something we mortals made.

Knowth.

My last day in Ireland I'd saved for Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth. To get there one must sign up for a tour. Misery. Pestilence. Woe. Most often, I believe, the hired coaches only go to Newgrange, the most widely known of the three, but I befriended the driver, told him how much I'd like to see everything I could, and he did a fantastic job of convincing his other customers that they all wanted this as well.

Previous scholarship held that these were the oldest megalithic sites in Ireland, built by foreigners new from mainland Europe. It was believed that as their creators bred and died and left the work to their less worthy descendants, the technologies and skills devolved. As the sites moved north and west and more time passed they became sloppier and simpler, the monuments at Carrowmore and Carrowkeel little more than a few inadequate stones clumsily piled atop the dead. I cannot recall who the originators of these theories are, but I detect at least a hint of anti-Irish sentiment. Fortunately, some lovely Swedish academics arrived and, with the deadly precision of their thesis, told their predecessors to eat it. Their more recent work suggests the opposite: that the first ancient Irish megalithic sites were those in the Northwest, that they grew in complexity and scale until creating a wonder, not just by the standards of a small place like Ireland, but standing out among the entire ancient world.

Dowth, the smallest of the three sites, is closed, so I've still not seen it. But Knowth is lovely: imagine a series of earthen mounds, perfectly round things clustered together, suggesting perhaps mushrooms, or hobbit houses. The domes are all covered over in grass, and some are ringed at the base with large stones. Many of the stones are marked with carvings, mysterious and intricate. There are spiral shapes, little suns and what might be stars, lines, curves, sharp and jagged things. It could be a language. It might be a system of magical notation, either set sigils the entire culture would have recognised, or a map to a more personal shamanism. They could be the boring hallucinatory scribblings any modern creature who has dabbled in such things would recognise, or stations at which worshipers could meditate. They could be nothing more than art, and nothing less. Of all of the ancient art of this type yet discovered in Europe, more than one third sleeps at Knowth, speaking in strange and subtle tongues, misunderstood differently by all who see it.

Inside of these artificial hills are caves. The same boulders that embrace the hillocks without reach into them, forming long corridors and their ceilings, being the walls and roofs of chambers, often roughly cruciform in shape. I walked into a few of them. I knelt in them, pressed my face to the cold stone.

One of the mounds, which is really more of a ring fort, is a Christian creation, which is strange. The messengers of the new faith did not bring violence against Ireland's people, but they were usually savage in destroying the objects and sites held sacred to the old religion. Knowth should have been smashed, but instead they not only allowed it to stand, but built a little cave of their own.

Dublin.

Naomi is French; her parents, however, are Polish and American. She speaks four languages. (Polish, actually, isn't one of them. Neither is Hebrew, although her mother lived in Israel for many years.) Juan Carlos is Mexican; his French is quite good, and he is new to English and a bit embarrassed by it. In the course of the few days I spent with them I met a fascinating pile of people, all from different countries and most fluent in an array of languages. Sometimes we could understand one another and sometimes we couldn't, but whether we could or not I loved it. There was signing involved, and quick translations from my hosts. I drank excellent microbrewed beer while I learned about anarchist and feminist politics in Dublin and in France, about magnificent international families, about the books written by Naomi's mother, about Mexico City and Paris and Rome.

The two Mexican girls who were also staying with Naomi and Juan Carlos conspired together, and the one who spoke a bit of English pulled me aside.

"We think you are amazing," she explained. "In Mexico, we are always told that as women, we cannot do anything alone. We really believe this. So sometimes, when I am studying in Paris by myself, I cry. I am very sad because I am not with a man, and I am not sure that I can do it. But you! You are doing this by yourself, all of this travelling. We are both very... what is the word? Impressed! Yes, very impressed with you."

I argued, "But you're the amazing ones! You're doing it! I was never told I couldn't. You're the ones who are brave."

Neither of us really believed the other.

She's studying law. She's studying civil rights in Paris, and when she is a lawyer she'll return to Mexico and save the world. The other is a teacher. Mexican children go to school in two groups, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, depending upon when their mothers work. In order to earn enough money to live, the woman I met worked both shifts. She teaches for more than ten hours a day. The children don't get recess or lunch, so the only break she gets is the half hour that elapses while one group of students leaves and the other arrives. Those hours do not include time spent grading or planning. That either woman could mistake me for brave seems absurd.

Kildare, the cathedral and an elusive well.

The cathedral itself is something of a museum now. The original had been built, supposedly, by Saint Brighid, whom the museum and church readily admitted had once been a goddess. "That other Brighid," they called her, which is very similar to what my grandmother (not the one who is praying for me, although this one might be too) usually called a certain gentleman caller who happened to have the same name as my father. The goddess Brighid was a triumvirate, a patron of blacksmithing, healing, and poetry. The myths speak again of the split between the culture gods and the nature gods. War threatened, and Brighid volunteered to marry the wild king. If there was a line between two ideas, Brighid could be found there, blurring the edges of things, joining them. She was a goddess of fire and of water, of eternal flames and holy wells.

Christianity came to Ireland, and Brighid, in a move similar to the one she made with her marriage, apparently decided to become a nun. She was successful that time: the new faith came peacefully. This Brighid was the daughter of a nobleman and his bondwoman, thus making her a creature of neither class and both. At her ordination the archbishop of Ireland accidentally read the wrong vows, making her not a nun, but, impossibly, a bishop. He claimed that the mistake had been the work of the Holy Spirit and defended it fiercely, refusing any challenge that was raised. Brighid was a defender of the poor, as exceptionally generous with her father's money as saints tend to be, and the founder of a notable monastery. Bridging perceived divisions again, she made a monastic centre for women and men both. In the story of her founding of it, she went to the noble who owned the land at what would become Kildare, which means church of the oak, asking for a space for her religious order. He offered her as much ground as her mantle could cover, and she accepted. The cloth, thrown down below the tree, expanded to cover enough ground to build the entire large town. I believe this is traditionally depicted as a miracle, but I've always imagined that she was a clever creature and unravelled her cloak, making one great, single ring of the thread.

The church was interesting to me for how little of Christianity was in it. There were saints in the stained glass. There were alters and a lectern and ornate confessionals and the things that one needs for the ritual, but there was no crucifix. I only found two images of Christ in the building, in fact. There were animals depicted in the tiles in the floor. There was a nautilus shell raised on a small dais in the back. The baptismal font was carved of a single rough piece of stone.

Outside of the church I found an old crypt that locals apparently once called Brighid's kitchen. I climbed into it, blinded by the dark. The few pictures I took were more to see the cavern through the light of my camera than to keep the pictures themselves. I took the stairs down, under the earth. The bricks at the back wall of the place curved, their shape suggesting an oven.

I spoke to the woman at the tourism centre and was given a map that should have directed me to a holy well dedicated to the saint. In Ireland the wells are often flanked by a tree covered in torn bits of cloth. The cloth is a prayer, tied onto a branch. It is when the attentions of time and weather eventually cause the fabric to disintegrate that the prayer is thought to be granted. However, either the map was a particularly Irish one or any skills I may posses at finding my way were failing me. I gave up, not much disappointed by not having found the well, and returned to Dublin and my fabulously international hosts.

Kildare's round tower.

"The monastery, though," the driver remembered and asked, "which one do you mean?"

"Oh dear," I laughed, "I suppose it might not be the only one now that the fifth century is over, hm?" I told him that I was content to walk around searching a bit, and we agreed that it would likely be best to drop me off in the middle of town.

This was, quite conveniently, very near a tourist office and a nice woman who stepped off the bus with me asking, "The cathedral? Do you mean the one with the round tower?" And, thinking round towers to be neat, decided that this one would do whether it was the one I'd originally intended or not. Luckily enough it was, and the tower was only an unexpected bonus.

It was guarded by an old man in a small hut. He took two coins from me, and up I climbed. Some told me, after I'd come back down again, that it was the tallest such tower in all of Ireland; others said it was only the second tallest. Either way, it's one of only two that you can climb. The doors of these structures are located high above ground level, maybe a distance of about twice my height or more. It's unclear to us now why this was the case: although monks did hide in these towers during Viking attacks, many existed before the raiders came. They weren't exactly defensive structures, either. Although they may have been used as watchtowers, it seems that for the most part the monks hid in the towers where the sacrament and various relics were kept specifically to die there. They ran to their martyrdom. They were immolated there, burning and crumbling along with the sacred texts they'd spent their lives copying by hand. I reached the door by wooden stairs. The monks themselves, and here at Kildare the nuns, too, would have used a ladder they could have pulled in after them: that the relics be destroyed was a tragedy, but their being taken by the pillaging heathens was thought worse.

The inside of the tower was traditional to the point that I was terrified. There were maybe five levels to it, just a series of simple wooden floors connected by very tall, steep, and narrow ladders. It had been raining that day, and the stone and wood inside were slick. Heights don't worry me at all, but ladders and certain staircases always have. The rift in the ceiling that birthed you to the next floor was small. The shoulder bag at my lower back caught on it, forcing me to contort and twist right where the hand rails ran out, curving my spine sharply like a cat, reaching behind me to brace on the floor where it ended, crawling, one knee and then the other to the ground, and then doing it all four more times. I have a few pictures that aren't very good of the view through these little passageways, the endless struts leading down below me, the stone walls a touch green and beginning to think of sliming over. I wondered how long it might take the old man to respond if he heard a scream and a thud or two.

Finally I reached a room with windows larger than the occasional slits in the stone that let in just enough light by which to climb. They were sealed off with plastic, but there was the cruciform cathedral below, the cemetery, the town, and farmland beyond that. They revealed the thickness of the stone that surrounded me, and were ringed on the outside with growing things, plants and moss. There was one more ladder up. And I laughed when I got to the top of it, not certain that the crevice cut in the roof itself had been original. The stone beneath my feet was irregular and slanted downward away from the centre, and I was ringed by stone in that rising and falling shape, crude triangles made of a series of squares, that one associates with the tops of medieval fortifications. I stood on top of the bloody thing. They'd erected a fence around it, I imagine to prevent jumping more than falling.

I realised then, to my great horror, that going down was going to be worse than going up. I decided next that worrying about it wouldn't do much good, and started the descent without much fuss. I was at the door and barely shaking in almost no time at all, only noticing on the way out the interesting carvings that ringed the portal.

The old man and I had spoken when he took my money before I'd gone up, but it was only midway through our second conversation that he noticed and asked, "Oh. You're an American?"

None taken. Usually I rather agree.

The next day I went on to Kildare. The main tourist attractions there are the Japanese gardens and the national stud. When I climbed on board an otherwise empty bus at the first stop, confirming that I had indeed got the right one, the driver asked whether I wasn't trying to get to those things, rather than to the town itself. "Actually, no. I'm looking for the monastery, although I'm not entirely sure where it might be. I've had decent luck so far in getting to the nearest town and wandering around a bit."

The driver studied me. "You're an American, are you?"

"All apologies."

"But, your accent. You haven't always lived in The States, have you?"

"I did live here in Dublin for a few months, but that was years ago. Oh, and I watch an awful lot of Doctor Who. But that's all. If you don't mind, may I ask what accent I seem to have?"

He began cautiously. "Well, you'd know you were an American to talk to you, but some of these Yanks, you'd know them coming from up the street, you know what I mean?" And he laughed to himself rather a lot before coughing on it a bit and then offering, "I mean, no offence."

Photography.

I've finally been able to begin uploading pictures! They can be found at my Flickr account.

Jerpoint Abbey.

Jerpoint Abbey is a very pretty ruin, and I'm glad I made the sometimes difficult walk there. You're first greeted by graves, and then a visitor centre you can ignore, and then a roofless and crumbling cathedral, and a lovely cloister. Snakes, knights, and saints are carved into the stone. Crows and jackdaws followed me there, roosting in the tallest tower, flirting and fighting and biting at one another and watching the meat walking about and taking pictures down below.

Cork, Limerick, Lough Gur.

From Cahersiveen I made my way to Cork. My delight upon entering a city again was as complete as it was unexpected. My utter surprise at finding more than a few buildings located within close proximity of one another may have seemed reasonable had I been away from cities for a few months or years as opposed to maybe a week. But I love the urban, and Cork, from what I saw of it, was wonderful. I had every intention of exploring, finding a queer bar and going dancing, but found instead that my hostel came with a wireless connection, that I had a good deal of writing I wanted to do, and that I was still exhausted. I took a few pictures of the local graffiti, bought a few new pairs of underthings, and moved on to Limerick.

Doing so was not easy. And when I finally got to the house where I was meant to be couch surfing, really wanting only to get something to eat, take a shower, and sleep forever, I instead discovered two things: that my host was not home, and that his parents did not know I was coming. His poor mother was very hospitable despite being a bit high pitched, seeming the entire time we waited for her son to arrive as if she were about to explode. I felt completely awful. And apparently I wasn't the only couch surfer he'd invited without telling her, either: there were two other Americans I hadn't known about already there. Brian, my errant host, arrived before long with two recently graduated boys from Seattle named Morgan and Eric. He announced that we'd be going out drinking, and not staying at his house but crashing on the floor at a friend's flat. I nearly fled, taking the next available bus to Dublin and getting a hostel there. But I'm very glad that I didn't.

A few drinks and some good conversation did me more good than retreating, defeated, into sleep would have. His friend Denis was adorable and desperately enthusiastic about alternative music and his friends' local bands. At the pub we danced to a funny little band from South Wales that made good use of an electric ukulele which my new Irish friends erroneously described as punk. I met Lindsey, a sweet red haired girl. I chatted about our dreadlocks with a stunning barmaid named Katie. I met a young man named Ray who was named for his uncle, one of the men to starve and die in the hunger strikes of the eighties. He was genuinely grateful and impressed that I'd even heard of the event, which I thought ridiculous, and sad. I lived here. Isn't knowing something about the place before coming over the least I could do? He actually shook my hand for having bothered to read a book. Then again, I did spend that day and the next gently reminding the other Americans that their word choices frequently made them seem to be presumptuous swine. Ray's mother was an American, and he asked me if I'd ever been to Philadelphia. He then asked if I'd ever heard of South Street, which is where she lived. How delightfully unlikely! I've been working on South Street for years, and flâneuring there for as long as I've been sentient enough to take a bus.

The next day we slept late, had a good breakfast, and then Brian drove Morgan and Eric and I to Lough Gur. I'd read that it was a pretty lake with a few small sites nearby. What I found instead was a positively astounding stone circle. The Grange was aligned to sunrise on midsummer, composed of more than a hundred large rocks, some of them homes to truly massive, ancient trees, practically infants compared to the age of the circle itself. The first tree I met was a truly gorgeous old thing, still thriving but completely hollow inside, the gash that opened her beautifully shaped. Her roots curled around ancient stone, it guiding her shape, her cracking it slowly, lovingly, over the course of long centuries. The next was near to the entrance, a short hallway of stones. He seemed to guard the place, moss clinging to him like a beard. I liked him immensely.

There was a small pile of rounded stones on the other side of the circle. It looked much like a child, and people had taken to leaving coins there, one and two cent pieces, pennies and a few pence. The other boys were standing around it, waiting for me to finish admiring the shrubbery so we could move on to the lake itself, wanting to leave a coin but apparently not having anything between the three of them. I hadn't anything so small at the time, but I left a bit of gold, a twenty cent piece, excusing it to them: "I like this place. It can have a bit more." The place sang.

They dragged me away and we explored an abandoned farmhouse, round holes built into the walls of one of the barns, meant for firing rifles through during the revolution.

We found the lake. We climbed the biggest hill by the water, got caught on nettles and climbed under and over live electric fences and barbed wire. I did so safely; two of the boys were a bit too daring and were punished for it. And, in my opinion at least, it was worth it. Atop the hill we could see not only the lake and the surrounding farmland, two castles and all the way to Limerick, but to the mountains curving around us on all sides. I stood on a hill and saw to the end of the world. We played up there, throwing rocks, frolicking and jumping and taking ridiculous pictures. When we got back down to the lake the weather had changed from occasionally pouring, usually dry but grey, to perfect blue skies, white clouds, and a shimmering lake. There is a crannog in the middle of it, a small island built in the Iron Age as a fortification on which the creators could safely keep cattle and their homes without much fear of a raid. The legend of Lough Gur is that once a year the water, which is only a glamour, disappears, and the city beneath the lake is made clear. I gazed into the shining place, the grasping green things growing under the surface.

As we drove back, Brian expressed his disappointment that I hadn't made it into town a bit earlier the day before. The boys had gone to a castle that had been boarded up and abandoned ages ago when the owner, a wealthy old woman, had gone mad and left her cattle outside and unfed in the winter. They all starved and died. She was locked up, and the place has had a reputation for being haunted ever since, if it hadn't already before. During the story he said the name of the place a few times, but I'm less accustomed to the Limerick accent than I am to some, and he swallowed his words a bit.

"Wait," I asked, "what was the name of the place again?"

"Castle Connell."

I laughed. I don't usually like to admit such things on the internet, but that's my surname. We have a castle, a castle haunted by a madwoman and cows.

The boys tried to break into it, climbing trees towards windows, pulling away the boards on the doors, but they failed. Pity I hadn't been there to help.

Dingle, part the second, and Cahersiveen.

The next morning I woke up a bit early in order to attempt to make the walk out to the oratory. I was accompanied by an American woman from the hostel who also wanted to see it, and a photocopy of a map given to me by a nice woman at the visitor centre. The walk was to be about eight kilometres each way on small country roads. There aren't walkways of any kind, but the Irish don't mind driving in the middle of the road for a bit in order to give you room. We'd only gotten about midway when we realised that we'd certainly made a wrong turn very early on in the journey. Irish roads are famously unmarked. Irish maps don't mention all of the roads, but only the main ones, or the ones the mapmaker thought you might need. We could have backtracked, but I was done. The walk in the country had been nice enough, and I wanted to get out of Dingle. I was on the next bus.

There was one other good thing about the place, but it wasn't at all Dingle's doing: on the page of my guidebook that dealt with the Gallarus Oratory, brief mention was also made of a couple of medieval stone forts in a somewhat nearby town called Cahersiveen on the next peninsula down. It seemed like a good enough idea, so I took a complicated series of buses in order to explore.

The stone forts were wonderful, though, and Cahersiveen was precisely what I'd needed after a tourist town. It was tiny and obscure, small enough to have one hostel in which the proprietor seemed a little surprised to have a modest pile of guests. The long walk to the sites, which I was pleased to take alone, only involved two roads, taking me on a bridge over a river, down a long, even more lovely country road, and past a castle. I might argue that my feelings about castles have less to do with my being a tourist and more with my being a big nerd, but the result either way is a rather huge collection of photographs with the things hanging about somewhere in the background.

The first site I visited was Cahergall, a massive ring of corbelled stones with a smaller ring at the centre. The inside of the larger circle was built in a series of steps that one could climb to get to the top, but that also made a convincing set of thrones if one were, for example, to use the place to strut about quoting Shakespeare, or the film Labyrinth, frequently pausing to sulkily collapse into appropriately royal stone seats. I believe I mentioned being a big nerd already, yes?

The second, Leacanabuile, was the older of the two, and certainly the simpler, but in its comparative disorder it had its own appeal. It was comprised of three separate old dwellings and two other structures, the owners leaving the older one where it was when they built and moved into the new one. The first was a traditional round hut, and the second and third square. One of them had an opening in the ground that led to a subterranean tunnel, unfortunately too narrow to allow for a bit of ill-advised solitary spelunking on my part. The true charm of this fort lie in the fact that its stone walls were all lower than eye-level with verdant grasses growing on the tops. I dream about such mazes. My favourite pictures of the place are the ones that obscure the true shape a bit, emphasising that labyrinthine quality. It helped that Leacanabuile is located in the middle of a pasture for sheep. They scattered at my approach, but when I first arrived a couple of the rams were grazing atop the walls of the fort, looking exceptionally noble and fey. On the bus out of the place I passed a town that boasted of being the location of Ireland's oldest folk festival. They celebrate Puck a bit later in August, apparently parading some lucky goat around the town, a crown perched on his horns.

Neither site was so sublime as the ritual grounds I've been chasing, but they were both truly delightful places. I might fall into states of childlike wonder more easily than most responsible adults, but not usually with such abandon. I wished rather intently that my young niece, who identifies as a pirate, a princess, and several other very important things besides, could play there.

The next morning was Lughnasadh. I took another walk in the country, eating some of the ripe wild blackberries I found on the road to celebrate.

Dingle, part the first.

People, including a good many of the ones from Ireland, apparently love Dingle. A German girl with whom I spoke for a bit at the first hostel in which I'd stayed mentioned that it was the one place an Irish family she'd met told her she absolutely had to see. The locals I've encountered couch surfing seemed genuinely happy for me when I told them that I'd been there. I cannot imagine why. It was Irish Disneyland. It was ugly and cheap and fake. It turned good stories, and worse than that, good people, into plastic clichés.

The scenery I passed on the bus ride over, actually, was really overwhelmingly pretty. Mountains, fields, ocean and shore arranged themselves in combinations more impressive than any I'd yet seen. This only had the affect of making me long even more for the ride back out again.

For Dingle's sake, perhaps I ought to admit a few complicating factors. I arrived there on the first day that the amount of time that I've been spending on buses began really getting to me. I've ridden between four and eight hours nearly every day since I started this trip, and although the view from the bus is often spectacular, it's getting to be a bit much. My sometimes tricky back doesn't seem to be enjoying it much either, honestly. Also, I had no idea of what I was getting myself into. Perhaps my sense of geography is occasionally a bit more American than I might care to admit? This was the first tourist town I'd ever stumbled into in Ireland. Had I known what the place was, I would have braced myself for it, and bemused, a bit dismissive, I would have ignored it.

My goal in going to Dingle had been to see the Gallarus Oratory, a stone monastic structure shaped a bit like an upturned boat. I allowed myself to be too tired to make the trek to find the place the night I got into town, deciding instead to get something to eat, to read a bit, and to sleep a great deal. There's something nice I can say about Dingle: I bought a cheap fish chowder in a restaurant there, and the salmon, cod, mussles, and perch that, in part, comprised it were the freshest fish I've ever tasted in my life. For reasons of professional pride, I wouldn't even admit this if it weren't so overwhelmingly true. Dingle is a fishing town, and the fish I ate were so fresh they were barely recognisable. The salmon was, I think, wild Atlantic, a thing that cannot be legally sold in the States. The mussels had a different texture than what I'm accustomed to selling and cooking. The cod was so fresh it tasted like a different fish entirely. I don't even normally like cod; the stuff in the chowder was spectacular. The dish as a whole was simple and well made, and served with Irish brown bread and butter, two things I'm really going to miss when this trip is over. There: you're not all bad, Dingle. Thanks for the soup.

Athlone.

Written 1/8/08 for The period between 28/7/08 and 30/7/08

My next host, John, was absolutely amazing. I really regret that the constraints of time and space dictate that I keep him only as someone I see from time to time if one of us happens to be on the correct continent. He and his roommate, a lovely boy named Dave, were house sitting for the directors of Athlone's theatre and street theatre troops, respectively. I stayed in the house belonging to the theatre director, a place filled with pretty musical instruments, art, three gigantic dogs, one toothless old cat whose name may or may not, according to its owners, have been Topsy, fish in a pond in the garden, and a snail on the garden wall. The house was in a pleasant part of town, and directly across the street from the front door was a nice grove with big trees and a little sign in Irish surrounded by flowers. My Irish usually isn't at all bad when it comes to things that might be on signs for the names of places, but the second half of this one was beyond me and I wondered what it might have said. John happened to remark on my last day there, as he started the car to take me to the bus station, that it was an old children's grave, from the time before stillborn, unbaptised infants could be buried in hallowed ground. The sign read either church of the children or wood of the children. Having been an outlawed language, it honestly is not entirely certain whether the Irish word "cill" means church but implies wood, or whether it means wood but implies church.

John took me everywhere in the area I possibly could have wanted to go, offered me tea as often as even I could have wanted it, and took me out for a nice vegetarian Irish breakfast.

We went to Clonmacnoise, an ancient monastic site that, at one time, would have been the cultural centre of Ireland. There were high crosses, round towers, ruins, and objects and locations said to offer healing powers. The one for back pain, unfortunately, was blocked off. It was once part of the framework of a church window, but has been lying on the ground looking rather like a seat or a throne for centuries. One was meant to sit in it in order to take the cure. I took pictures, hoping that the transference might happen in that way as well.

He took me through a gate, down a path, into a field on the top of a hill where we found a stone carved almost imperceptibly with ancient sigils.

We went to the bog at Corlea where an ancient trackway had been found: the widest such thing ever found in Europe, made of wood and perfectly preserved under the peat. No one knows exactly why it had been built. Either it was meant to connect ancient ritual sites (it did stretch between them, certainly) or it had been built to sink. Nothing that large would float atop the bog for long, as the Celts, who had been sinking sacrificial victims in it with some frequency, would have known. I side with both, actually. They built the sort of architectural feat the Romans are still bragging about, a perfectly straight road connecting two of their most impressive religious sites and cities, and used it until it was claimed by the earth itself and became a passageway for and in the underworld. And the conversation at the little museum planted atop the trackway (on top of steel support structures many metres deep, I should mention) was fantastic. We were taught about the particulars of the local bog men, the royal victims found broken and murdered in antiquity, but so well preserved by the highly acidic peat that, when found, sometimes cause the police to begin searching the missing persons registries. My little group was well informed. In the course of the talk we found one another assisting the expert, listing the uses of sacred trees, filling in the names of the old gods and other sites with similar archeological finds. I learned about fairy forts, a term which refers specifically to ancient artificial hills with trees on top. Our guide told us of a former visitor whose father, she'd insisted, had been a sensible man, not at all given to telling mad tales. They had a fairy fort on their property, but no one ever went near it. In a rush one day her father cut through it, not thinking much about it, and within was confronted with what he thought, at first, to be a beautiful woman dressed in grey, but then found to be a terribly old man with very long, knotted hair. Her father ran, and no one ever went near the place again. I think this makes them sound a bit cowardly, honestly, although I'm willing to believe that the encounter felt sinister for reasons that were not adequately conveyed. Making others uncertain as to whether you're a curvaceous young thing or an old man sounds a bit too much like what I do to people on an average day for me to be much frightened by it.

That evening John took me to the oldest bar in Ireland, a place called Sean's Pub that had been open since approximately the year 900. I had a marvellous time, drinking with John and one of his friends, and with an Irish metal band that had been living on a boat. I'd presumed that this was for purposes of touring, but looking back on it, I'm not at all certain. We stayed up a good deal later than the taxies, but the long walk home was good for me. I had to wake up earlier than I would have liked to catch my bus to Dingle, but was able to do so without any trace of a hangover.

Croagh Padraig.

I climbed a mountain. Were my family not reading this, there would be a pleasant pile of proud blasphemies located between the words "a" and "mountain". Croagh Padraig (I'd chosen to pronounce it Crow Patrick from the start and was quite pleased to find that I was actually correct.) is the tallest mountain in the Westport area, and is a holy mountain and traditional pilgrimage site.

My first accomplishment, before I ever climbed it, was finding it. Following that, the mountain was both more and less difficult to gain than I'd expected. Or, rather, it was actually a good deal more difficult than I'd thought it would be, but I was far more capable of it than I would have guessed. The terrain was made up of loose rocks, the size, perhaps, of my five-year-old niece's balled fist, and larger fixed stones that required a bit of labouring to surmount. I began my climb at two, and despite the hard work was continuously amazed at how much ground I was able to cover in relatively short periods of time. The pictures I took of the view, the surrounding mountains, the towns and fields below, the sea beyond that, exist to document my relative position as I made the climb as much as because the view was, in fact, as devastatingly beautiful as one could ever ask this magnificent country to be. As I just mentioned to my mother in an email, this week I've found some of the most spectacular landscapes I've ever seen in my life, and nearly every time I'm a bit humbled to find that sheep and cattle live out their lives in such places. I've asked a few of the rams about it, and they assure me that they are in fact sufficiently grateful.

Croagh Padraig has two stories of which I know. In the one that involves the saint of the same name, Patrick, in a story that sounds an awful lot like Christ in the desert, spent forty days and forty nights fasting on the mountain. In this version not the devil himself but the devil's mother assaulted Patrick, doing so in the form of a bird and in the form of a snake. Victorious, Patrick banished the serpents but, feeling generous, apparently allowed the birds to stay. From the peak he then surveyed the land that he had won for Christianity. The mountain was holy long before that, though. Originally it had been associated with Crom Dubh, the old god whose one burning eye had once brought fertility but now scorched the fields, and with Lugh, the swaggering upstart deity who came to challenge him. Crom Dubh was king at the time and was of the race of the nature gods, and the ancient people of this island, like anyone who has to spend any amount of time in it, understood that nature is as terrifying as it is nourishing. Lugh came to fight in the name of the gods of culture. Many of the myths circle this theme: worshipping the land and the mind both, realising that the natural world doesn't actually care whether or not you have anything to eat, giving due respect while being ready to work and fight for what you need. The sun was king until it burnt too hot, then we prayed for rain. Lugh, besides being the god of being good at nearly everything, is a god of lightning, and of storms. Fittingly, I got a bit of a sunburn on my climb.

Although pilgrims make the climb nearly every day of the year, Christians do so on the last Sunday of July, whereas the pagans would have done so on the last Friday. Both occur a few days before Lughnasadh, one of the quarterly festivals, the one that marks Lugh's victory. That's today, as it happens. I like that Crom Dubh gets a holiday of his own before he's torn down. Climb to the top of the mountain. Kiss the sun goodbye before you try to kill it. I missed both traditional dates, although not by much. Irish buses, as I've mentioned, are exercises in piety. They nearly stop running on Sundays, so I did as best I could and got to the mountain on Monday, instead. I'm glad of it, too. According to the taxi driver who got me from Westport, the last town to which I could get a bus, to Murrisk, the town at the foot of the mountain, more pilgrims arrived this year than any he could remember. They usually expect twenty-thousand people. He guessed he saw thirty to forty-thousand.

Oh, yes. One traditionally made the climb barefoot. Only one person I saw did, and I needn't mention that I adore my shoes and wouldn't have taken them off even if my doing so would have meant the conversion of Ireland to some interesting new creed of my devising.

I suppose I should admit that I didn't quite make it to the top. I'll remind anyone who asks, however, that my endurance is not to blame. Unfortunately, there was only one series of buses to get me near the place, and only one set to get me to the place at which I was sleeping, and the time between them was not adequate to make it all the way. Pity. I got quite close, though, as near as the first of the three ancient cairns that mark stations near the peak. They're ancient burial sites marked with piles of stones, and the devout walk around them in multiples of seven and three saying Our Fathers and Hail Mary's and Creeds.

So. Take your pick. Mark your prayers on stones and beads. Fight or dance with snakes and birds. Conquer and marry the earth and the sky. Kiss the sun. Bring the rain.

I'm on a bus between Limerick and Tralee, which is really one of several between Athlone and Dingle.

Written 30/7/08

Before I left, I was told that my grandmother will pray for me every day while I'm gone, and that she knows that I am capable.

And every day thus far, there has been a moment where things seemed rather close to going wrong. Nothing devastating or dangerous, mind. As I keep reminding myself, the worst case scenario is that I have to take a nice walk in Ireland until I've sorted things or rearranged my plans a bit. (Oh no. Not that.) Thus far these adventures in getting from one place to another feel more like extremely rewarding little puzzles than frustrations. But every day there is a moment where I didn't know how to get where I have to go, or where it seemed that a bus I needed would be missed, or didn't exist at all. And every time I've guessed, made a turn on a whim, and found the house for which I was looking right there in front of me. I find the station in less time that it would have taken me to get there had I known where I was going, and somehow manage to climb onto the bus at the very last possible moment. Serendipity. I've always been good for that, but not half this often. I thank my grandmother for it every time.