Hlymrekr

When I started this blog, I promised some account of my travels, but there has been too little of that (though I have travelled quite a lot in the last year or so) and too much of robbing things from the internet and the media. So I am quite happy to report on a recent lightning visit to Limerick. Apart from the usual things that make it a pleasure to visit Ireland (Guinness, friendly people, fiddle music leaking out of pubs, heathery mountains on the horizon) I was quite taken by the ruined church, round tower and cross at Dysart O'Dea (or however you wish to spell it). Both the splendid romanesque doorway to the church and the cross up on the hill had what seemed, to my inexpert eye, to be late-flowering Irish Urnes-style decoration (see the photo). And of course there were the usual pleasures of Irish sacred sites, with the garishly but lovingly decorated family graves, a tower house in the distance, and the nearest village with the 20 pubs in different colours. Coo....