Cottages and Castles

Cottages and Castles
Ireland 2001

In the Spring of 2001 I took my wife on her first visit to Ireland to retrace some of my steps there as a student, and also for me to see parts of Ireland that I hadn’t seen back then.

I had thought the photos of that trip had been lost, until last week when they turned up among old financial records that I had decided there was no need to keep.

Perhaps because as a retiree one has more leisure time, or becomes more aware that time does eventually run out, I have become more proactive about tidying up various loose ends.

It’s been an uneven effort, sometimes long sessions overheating my shredder destroying piles of ancient documents that I finally realize will be of no historical value, or hours digitizing old photos and storing them on my computer.

But sometimes a document or a photo will cause me to stop and reminisce, and all the remaining ones slated for destruction that day are just shoved back into the obscure nooks where they had been peacefully gathering dust for years.

One such photo was this one of me pretending to be a peasant leaning over the half door of a cottage in a tiny isolated village in the Ring of Kerry in the southwest of Ireland.
It’s a completely unremarkable picture and very phoney of course. Just look at that windbreaker style jacket, a dead giveaway: a proper peasant farmer would be wearing an old tweed jacket over a sweater. He wouldn’t be smiling at the camera. In fact it would probably be the farmer’s wife, not the farmer, leaning over the door to gossip with a passerby. Besides, to let you in on a secret: it wasn’t even a real village, just one recreated for tourists.

What this photo did was prompt me to think about why travel has been so enjoyable. Yes, we all know it broadens the mind, etc., but perhaps it also fills another need. When we are young, role playing comes naturally. Later on our careers or position in society assign us various serious lifelong roles.

Travel is fun role-playing for adults. It gives us a good excuse to assume identities we cannot be otherwise unless we want to be considered odd, or even weird.

On the morning tour I was that Irish peasant.

In the evening, I was uncorking champagne in my hotel room and only me, my wife and the hotel receptionist had to know that it wasn’t because I was some highly paid business executive but because the champagne, and the foil wrapped Belgian chocolates for my wife were just part of the highly discounted Weekend Package.



Later into the night I was a chieftain welcomed into a Medieval castle for a banquet


with gowned ladies

Knives, but no forks: one tore into his meat with his fingers and drank mulled ale. My name tag might have read “Henry VIII” for all I knew or cared after a few goblets of strong mead.

Another goblet of mead for My Lady?


I could have been an English (oops, bad mistake, this was in Dublin!) gentleman settling into his favorite wingback chair, pipe in hand, to read whilst the last of the daylight filtered in through those tall widows before the drapes were drawn for the night. Just for the price of a night’s lodging in this Bed and Breakfast in Dublin.


At the Waterford Crystal studio I fancied myself a consummate crystal artisan and connoisseur as we posed with this exquisite piece, but bought only a pair of wine goblets.


Then you board your plane for the return from your flight of fantasy through those cottages

and holy places

and castles

and the hotel room overlooking the university

where you had evolved from student to professional and began to earn the means to return years later to reprise your role as student and youngman..