New Grange, Tara, Old Mellifont Abbey.

We took our first Saint Mary's trip on Saturday, which is one of a series that will be taking as a school while we are here. Roberta, the Saint Mary's representative living here, is fantastic for having arranged them all. I love that the buses look like caterpillars! :)


Thanks to Miss Meagan Drone for the majority of these pictures, especially the artsier ones, because my camera ran out of batteries so I stole these from her facebook.

First we went to New Grange, which is one the most famous prehistoric monuments in the world, and is the most famous in Ireland. It is a large mound built of stone in around 3100 B.C., and was used as a tomb. It was built so that the sunrise during the winter solstice would illuminate the chamber through the narrow entrance. We all went inside the small tomb, and our guide Carlos simulated the how the sunrise would look with different lights. He did say, however, that the actual sunrise would be much more magnificent than a 40 watt bulb.
There were ceremonial carvings along the walls, the most famous being a series of swirls as you'll see in my pictures.

First, Megan R. and I decided that while everyone was taking pictures of famous monuments and scenery, we would take pictures with the mundane, everyday things around us. We thought our mothers would appreciate our senses of humor while we were traveling. Really this brilliant plan only lasted about two pictures, beginning with me and a mop.

Unfortunately, this is about the best picture of New Grange as a whole that we have, and it includes the office at New Grange in it. It's an enormous mound.

The Entrance into the tomb. You can see the swirls on the rocks that I was talking about. Because these rocks are about as tall as we are, and they block the entire entrance, they built stairs going around the rocks. The tomb was a narrow passage, and we had to duck and walk sideways at one point to get into the heart of New Grange, but it was worth it. No pictures were allowed inside, sorry.

View from New Grange.
Megan R., Me, Meagan D.

We also went to Tara, which is basically an enormous area full of little muddy hills, and a few very large ones. We spent about an hour running all of our energy out up and down all these hills. Unfortunately, we don't really have any pictures capturing the hills. However, I do know that some girls have videos of all of us running up and down them, so I'm in the process of tracking those down now.

Here is Megan R. and I at Tara, you can see a bit of hillyness, but not nearly as much as there was. The view from Tara was fantastic! We could see so far, and it truly is a shame that that type of magnificence can never be captured in a photograph, because all I thought at the time was how much I wanted to share it with my friends and family at home.

I don't honestly know how this picture came to be, and I don't think Megan does either, but both of us think it's hilarious.

Old Mellifont Abbey was my favorite stop of the trip. There were a ton of ruins from the Abbey all around, and every single part was a photograph waiting to happen. As you will see, we climbed all over them.



When we first got to the Abbey, this is what we saw.

So we were jumping in it and having a grand ol' time, when Roberta comes up to us and says "Girls, you know this isn't the Mellifont Abbey, right?" She leads us to the edge of a hill on the other side of where the bus was, and there were ruins EVERYWHERE. We all had a good laugh about that! Here are the rest of the pictures:


Awesome picture of Meagan D.

Me feeling liberated.


The entire SMC group.




This was one of our favorite pictures of the day.

Modeling as I'm sure the monks would have.


We also went to a cemetery down the road so that we could see the enormous crosses. After all the jumping and running, coming here was pretty sobering pretty fast. There were a lot of stones for infants who had died. An interesting difference here is that marker stones are used to write about the whole family. Entire families were buried in the same plot, and one headstone was used with a list of names. If someone new passed away, they would add the name and some information about them, leaving space below the names for other relatives to be written about when their time came.

Here is one of the crosses. It stood probably 30 ft or so tall, and was wider than it looks in this photo.

Here is a cool image of the cemetery and evening sky at the time.
Being here made me very homesick. A lot of the graves had messages from living family members written to their loved ones that we could read, and it made me miss my family a lot.
Two particular ones hit me harder than the rest:

One was from a daughter to her father. She wrote about how his hard-working hands kept the family together, how he taught her to ride a bicycle, and eventually how she was holding his hands as he "slowly slipped away." It made me emotional, and reminded me of how much I really miss my Daddy.

The other one was from a girl named Geraldine to her mother. It was a small poem saying:

'If ever I lost a friend,
I could always find another.
But I lost my very best friend
The day I lost you, mother.
Love, Your Geraldine'

I felt like I would have been saying the same things, had I been Geraldine, and while we were driving to the next site I couldn't help but reflect on my childhood the entire time, and think of how loving my mother has been to me.

I miss you, Mom and Dad, more than I can say.

Sláinte.