Deep in the Christmas season and I'm still posting diaries about my trip to Ireland last summer. Perhaps next week I'll take a break and post some more recent photos of how the season has been shaping up around Prague.
That will be as it will be, but in the meantime I've got a whole nativity scene's worth of photos of critters to share. press fit connector assembly
On the grounds of the Muckross estate, we've already had a busy day taking a tour of Muckross House, hiking the trails through Reenadinna Wood and explored the ruins of Muckross Friary. We still have a couple hours left before the tour bus leaves.
On the hillside to the east above Muckross House there is a living museum called Muckross Traditional Farms. Three working farms which show what life was like on a typical Irish farm in the 1930s and 1940s. You won't find a lot of electricity or running water around the place. Each farm also reflects the differing levels of income from a farm of that size. A road winds up the hill, past a small farm, a medium farm, and a large farm. In each farm you can find employees of the museum, dressed in period clothes, working at the farms.
Our first stop was at the small farm. The house itself was not exactly huge, just a couple of rooms and the outbuildings for the animals and storage were attached.
Just down the road a bit was the Laborer's Cottage. A typical tiny home for the hired help that might find work on the larger farms.
There was a young woman baking loaves of Brown Bread here, but the crowd had caught up to me and I scampered back out before getting any pictures and made my way to the medium farm.
We soon made our way to the top of the hill and the large farm.
Just past the sheds was a trail that led to a set of more modern barns where a variety of farm animals were kept. We went down to explore and then returned by the same path back up to the large farm to see the inside of the house.
We made our way to a small cluster of buildings that contained a leather worker's tack room, a woodworker's shop and a blacksmith's forge.
If you've got a sharp eye you might have noticed that the Woodworking Shop has a collection of leather belts and scraps on the table. That's because a charming and incredibly clever, absolutely tiny Mexican woman far past any reasonable retirement age was teaching herself how to repair a horse's bridle. Mrs the Werelynx and I spent a bit of extra time in the Woodworker's Shop listening to her tell the story of how she and her husband (an Irishman) came to the farms to restore wagons and carriages for the various museums around Ireland.
After her husband died, she stayed on at the Traditional Farms as their resident woodworker. The man who had done the leather work had recently died and she took it upon herself to learn the many skills required to make, fit and repair leather harnesses and saddles until the museum could find a new leather worker. She showed us a bridle that she was repairing, how she'd carefully punched through stitching holes to match the holes in the worn piece of leather she was replacing. And she admitted to cheating a bit by using a small power drill. Authenticity is sometimes deemed of lesser importance when time is pressing on a project and even her remarkable hands could only do so much in a day. She told us about learning a bit of horse anatomy so that she'd understand better where a bit of harness needed to be loose and where it needed to fit snugly to prevent the horse from getting blisters and sores.
Inside the schoolhouse we were treated to a short lesson in the Irish language, Gaelic or properly, Gaeilge.
Then back out, through the gift shop and across the parking lot to Muckross House.
And that does it for my photos from Muckross. Perhaps something more in the Christmas line next week. I've basically still got another diary worth of photos just from our return trip from Muckross, because yes, we had another stop and there were even a few photos taken from the windows of the bus that were also worth sharing. So perhaps we'll get to that in the new year.
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