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?"