8/7/07 Day 9: Glin Castle and Home

In the morning, we decided to take a last look around Galway before leaving. The party weekend was not kind to the city’s streets, and everywhere we looked we saw empty kegs and trash. There weren’t many people out and about so early, early in this case being about nine o’clock in the morning. We walked towards Galway Center. Along the way we passed the bronze statue of Oscar Wilde and Edouard Wilde (no relation; Ed was, in fact, Estonian), the two writers seemingly deep in conversation since at least 1999, when the statue was constructed. (In real life, the two never met.)

Sitting between them was this young lady, playing some jigs and reels on her flute. We listened for a few minutes, and then Dad wandered over to her flute case and dropped a handful of Euro coins inside. He returned to find me and Seth staring at him.
“What?” he asked. “She’s good!”
“She better be,” I said, “because I think you just gave her about twenty-six dollars.”
“I’m surprised she’s even finishing the tune,” Seth said. “If I was her, I’d pack my shit up now and leave before you could change your mind.”
(In the time since we were there, the statue developed a crack in the middle and needed to be fixed. I’m certain it had nothing to do with this woman sitting on it.)

In Galway Center, we hung out at the Galway Hooker Monument, a rust-colored statue/fountain that resembles a Galway Hooker, which, contrary to what you might assume based on its name, is a type of sailboat. (We had no idea what it was, actually; it just looked picture-worthy.) On our way out of town we stopped for about an hour or so at Galway Bay, where we looked out at the water and wished we could stay for one more day.

Instead we left Galway and took the N18 back through County Clare; bound, so Dad thought, for Shannon. We were supposed to stay our last night there and fly out of Shannon airport the next day. What Dad didn’t know (surprise!) is that Seth and I planned our best accommodations for our last night in Ireland. Our destination wasn’t Shannon; it was Glin Castle, about an hour’s drive east (then west) of the airport. We broke the news to Dad over lunch in Limerick (we had to drive through Shannon to get back there), but didn’t tell him where we were going.
Located between the towns of Foynes and Tarbert on the banks of the River Shannon, Glin village is so small, you would think something as large as a castle would be easy to spot. After several trips back and forth between Foynes and Tarbert without so much as a sign pointing the way, we began to suspect Glin Castle didn’t really exist. Dad wasn’t much help, berating us from the back seat.
“You losers got lost, didn’t you? You both have no idea where the hell we are.”
“Sure we do,” I said.
“Yeah,” Seth said. “We’re in Foynes. Or maybe Tarbert.” Seth looked at me. “Where the hell are we?”
“Seems to me we’ve been wherever here is about three times already,” Dad said. “Wake me up when we get wherever we’re supposed to be.”
Eventually, we got directions to the castle at a restaurant in Tarbert. We had driven past it about four times. At last we took the long private drive through the woods up to the castle, passing a tractor along the way.
Glin Castle has been owned by the FitzGerald family, the hereditary Knights of Glin, for over 700 years. The current Knight of Glin is Desmond FitzGerald, an obscenely wealthy guy who is the president of the Georgian Society and who used to work for Christie’s as an antiquities buyer when he wasn’t hanging out on his five-hundred woodland acre estate. He has no male children and he’s in his seventies and married, so it’s likely he’ll be the last Knight of Glin.
The castle has an interesting history. It’s not the original castle; that was destroyed in a battle with Elizabeth’s forces in 1600. The new castle is a Georgian mansion constructed sometime in the eighteenth century and slowly completed over the course of the next two hundred-plus years. In the 1920’s shortly after the Irish War of Independence, the IRA paid the (then) Knight a visit and told him his lands were forfeit, as no one who owed their title to the English Crown could keep their lands. The Knight gave them a document in Latin written by the Duke of Normandy that indicated his title was not granted by the English Monarchy, so the IRA left the Knight alone and let him keep his lands and title, which he holds to this day.
Two servants awaited us in front of the castle. Dad drew the first logical conclusion that entered his mind when faced with a sprawling manor house at the end of a long, private drive, complete with an immaculately-groomed lawn and gardens and a smiling, non-threatening staff. “What the hell is this place, a mental hospital?”

We were greeted by the two servants. The first was an attractive girl of Czech descent, who called herself Michele. The second was a German whose name—I shit you not—was Fritz, although Dad, for reasons known only to him, decided to call him Raoul for the entire time we were guests of the Knight. (This did little to endear him to Fritz.)
Although there were undoubtedly many unseen servants prowling around, these two were the only ones we would see during our stay. (We didn’t actually see the Knight, of course.)
Fritz grabbed our bags while Michele led us inside. She confirmed our reservation and gave us the quick rundown of the castle services. Around this time, Seth and I noticed Dad had disappeared. We called out and looked around, but couldn’t find him.
“Where the hell is Dad?” Seth asked.
I eyed a suit of armor with suspicion. “Do you have any secret passages or trapdoors he could have fallen into?” I asked Michele.
The old man wandered back into the main hall just in time to get his room key. He had been taking a look around.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Fritz led us upstairs and showed us around our suites. Seth and I bunked together and gave Dad his own room, which looked out on the castle’s “back yard”.

We took some time to rest up and explore the castle and the grounds. I could describe everything, but why bother? Here’s some pictures.

As stated previously, the Knight is an antiques dealer, and the rooms he lets his guests hang out in are full of lots of stuff. While in general it’s a bit too cluttered for my refined taste, he castle was still damn cool. We were assured that if we needed anything at all, we should simply ask and the staff would do their best to accommodate us.
Seth, of course, wanted a Guinness. He had to settle for a can of Murphy’s instead. It also cost him €10. I wanted a martini, and Glin Castle actually looked promising in this respect, but when Michele told me it would cost me €16, I said no thanks.

It was fast approaching dinner time and we hadn’t eaten for hours. Breakfast was included with our stay, but dinner was not; in other words if we wanted to eat the Knight’s food, we had to pay for it. Everything at the castle is prepared with the herbs and vegetables grown in an enormous walled garden outside. We had just wandered down the garden paths, dodging bees the size of golf balls, for the past hour or so. Everything out there looked amazing. But then we caught a glimpse of what the Knight charges for dinner, and we decided we’d eat in town.
Unfortunately, there’s no place to eat in Glin. From what we could tell, Glin village contains about three streets, two churches, a couple of bars and a castle. While beautiful, Glin was a pretty boring town. I felt sorry for a pair of teenage girls we ran into. They practically assaulted Seth trying to bum a smoke. Seth, being a responsible adult, didn’t give them any cigarettes. (Of course, he was almost out, too, and American cigarettes are even more expensive in Ireland, so they were shit out of luck any way you look at it.) We drove back to where we asked directions in Tarbert and ate there. Then we decided to visit the pub in Glin and get royally shitfaced on our last night in Ireland.
Ireland’s Blue Book, which is a guide to historic Irish houses and castles I picked up at Glin Castle, states that Glin village “boasts the most traditional pub in Ireland.” I do not believe any of us found the pub in Glin to be any more “traditional” than most of the other pubs we patronized. Aside from the bartenders and one local fellow, the three of us were the only patrons of the pub that night. I chatted with one of the bartenders and casually mentioned we were guests of the Knight. Seeing how Glin Castle is the only place to stay in Glin, this didn’t come as a surprise to him, nor was he impressed. According to him, “the Knight has a bit too much of an English accent for my tastes to be considered Irish nobility.”
Over the next couple of hours, I got wrecked on pear cider and Bushmills. Seth drank lots of Guinness. Dad had a gin and tonic and nursed it all night, and at some point we all had to dodge an enormous mastiff hound on the way to the bathroom. (He—for there was no mistaking it was a he, trust me on this—was friendly. Thank Christ.)
Back at the castle, Dad and I went straight to bed while Seth decided to stay up and drink more of the Knight’s private stock of canned Murphy’s. We all met up for breakfast downstairs in the morning.
We were all so sick of the standard Irish breakfast buffet food by this point that we couldn’t even think about eating it, but there was no standard buffet fare to be found. Like dinner, breakfast is cooked to order. In other words, tell them what you want and they’ll make it for you from all the freshest ingredients available. (Want ham and eggs? The pig was probably killed yesterday and the eggs game from the chickens outside.) Despite this, none of us took advantage of the no-doubt excellent food. We just couldn’t eat anymore.
I ate a few bites of smoked salmon that tasted like a cat’s breath (ok, so not everything was excellent). Then I switched to toast and coffee. Dad and Seth did pretty much the same. Fritz, a.k.a. Raoul, brought our bags and we bid farewell to Glin Castle.
The ride between the castle and the airport seemed a lot shorter than it was the day before, but that’s probably because we didn’t want to leave. We checked our luggage and did some last minute shopping for Mom. Then we had one last Guinness at the airport bar before flying home.

The flight back seemed a lot shorter, too.