I love picking through old ruins.  Back home in Oakland, California, I find no more pleasant way to pass an afternoon than sift through boarded up houses and search for old hypodermic needles.  What history they impart to us!  How it fires the imagination to think of the people who used them, and what their lives were like!

So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I went to Adare in County Limerick in order to see several old medieval ruins, including a well known Franciscan friary, founded by the Earl of Kildare in 1464.  The old woman behind the counter said “You need to get there by car.  There’s no foothpath, and it’s too narrow over the bridge to walk, especially in this kind of heavy traffic we’re having today.”

My guidebook said nothing about needing a car. I looked at her suspiciously.  Unlike Dublin’s Temple Bar and Galway, where I was somewhat long in the tooth compared to the throngs of tanned people on the hunt for beer and saliva, I was distinctively young for Adare.  This was a place for old retired people to stop and browse for floral prints in tourist shops.  Their danger was my opportunity.  I’m sorry, Mom and Dad, but I didn’t want to lie on my deathbed and wish that I had braved the bridge to see the ruins.  It was time to step out of the frying pan and into the friar.

As I suspected, the walk wasn’t really all that bad.  Yes, the traffic was a little nervewracking.  Irish eyes are smiling?  No, Irish eyes are red-rimmed with road rage.  And although I had been blessed with clear weather the entire week, today the clouds split open and rain hammered the road.  I moved slowly and kept close to the bridge rail.  The peril wasn’t all that perilous, and I got to my destination soon enough.

It was great.  I am not superstitious, but I like to visit places that make it obvious why other people are superstitious.  In the cloudy, rainy weather, the ruins of the friary were ethereal, spectral.  The word that came to mind, although it was early afternoon, was “gloaming.”

Of course, all of this was only true as long as you kept your head inside the ruins.  Because I neglected to mention that the friary is smack in the middle of a golf course.  Forgotten golf balls were mixed inbetween the stones, and when you stepped outside the crumbling altar area, machines that rattled and belched smoke were busy tending the grass.  So on top of everything else, maybe the friary is a metaphor for the way E.U. money is changing the face of Ireland and slowly engulfing its historical heritage?  Nah.  I think it’s a metaphor for the fact that ruins are totally cool.