Story: Playing Castle

We became thinking about our winter trip in October and didn't conclude with Ireland until the end of November. We bought a ticket on the fly, a bargain actually, and couldn't wait to embark. The trip started in Dublin, my boyfriend, his father, and I set out on a road trip through Ireland's majestic coastline. I've never seen such a brilliant green in all of my life and the Guiness was the best beer I've ever had.

Among the many things we saw in Ireland, the Cahir Castle was one of the most memorable. After a long debate on whether we should go or not considering we'd have to play, it was slightly off our path, and it was getting dark, I convinced the boys it would be worth it. We arrived at the castle at around 3:00 pm in Cahir, Tipperary, Ireland. We weren't sure of where to enter but assumed we should walk the bridge over the mote, yes the castle had a fairy-tale mote! We bought our tickets for the excited self-guided tour. Self-guided being the key, we were allowed to play and explore on our own!

The castle has been wonderfully preserved since it was first build in 1142 by Conor O'Brien. It was just donated to the state in 1961. Some of the rooms have the heaters that were put in by the family that lived there until then. It's one of the largest castles in Ireland.

We walked under this stone doorway out into a court yard with lovely green grass. There were battlements surrounding it and we first climbed the short, steep steps up to the top. There were faux cannons pointing over the mote toward the city. Then we moved on to the dinning room a huge room with a tall ceiling. It has a table and some original chairs around the perimeter. There were huge antlers on the wall facing the doorway. One thing that gripped me most about this room was the views from the windows, the castle grounds on all sides are just moving. The intense greens with the mote are so pleasant no wonder people lived there well into the 20th century!

The dining room was nothing compared the the winding staircases that led to small rooms in the towers. All of the rooms had long skinny windows to fit a bow and arrow. The walls were white with some green algae or moss growing on them. There were several of these rooms but more was left for us to explore.

This castle was not only complete with a mote, but a dungeon too! The stairway lead down from the courtyard into a dark hole with metal stairs that had been put in. The hall leading to the dungeon rooms were cramped and small. The windows on these room were the size of a Little Debbie Cake and hardly any light could penetrate the darkness or the feeling that there were people who died in these rooms. The iron gates were in place and huge locks as well. I'm not sure if they were original or reproductions but they were scary enough for me. As we continued to climb the staircase we were put out onto a landing that you could look over the mote onto the city's dam and the main street. It was a sharp contrast to what led us there but equally as appealing.

Those were the dungeon's rooms upstairs, we went down the stairs under the metal ones. At this point I had lost my boyfriend to the dungeon and was waiting for him to creep up on me. As I got to the bottom stair I flashed my camera flash down into the darkness and I spotted his foot. He was hiding in a hidden stairway, and fortunately for me he was unable to scare me. The last doorway lead on to a shallow part of the mote under the bridge we had come in on. Was the door possibly for escaping inhabitants? Self-guided tours leave you will all kinds of room for speculation it's better for the imagination. I won't even let you in on what I was thinking when near the mote I smelled an unnatural stench. Later on I learned my boyfriend had marked that mote as his territory in Ireland.

The tour ended with a bump on the head, right by a "Mind Your Head" sign and a pose near an eagle. We left the castle with a renewed sense of childhood fun. I had decided if I lived in Cahir I would have loved to play hide and seek there or pretend I was a damsel in distress, but alas all I had were forts created with sheets and chairs.