Paddy wagon Tour
Trip Start
Aug 05, 2005
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Trip End
Dec 29, 2005
The first day of our Paddy Wagon adventure started with a long drive southwest out of Dublin, down through Kilkenny to our first stop at Cahir Castle. Along the way our guide Joe told us many stories about the landscape and the history of the area. We passed the fields where "Braveheart" was filmed. At Cahir Castle we had a short guided tour from Anne Kennedy, and then we were allowed to wander around the grounds a bit. I was particularly impressed with a canon ball that is lodged in one of the towers from centuries ago, and with the main hall where there is a deer head mounted that had the largest rack I have ever seen. Apparently it is an ancient Irish deer and they have since become extinct. The castle itself sits on an island, so it was relatively easy to defend. The tour included showing us all the wonderful ways that castle folk defended themselves from intruders, like pouring nasty things on them, and crushing them with large rocks and shooting them with arrows through the narrow slits in the castle walls. It was an interesting tour, and an interesting castle.
