Saturday, August 6, 2011

In this one I crack the code of ancient Irish

Sometimes, I shock myself. As the smarter of you lot might have figured out, I am in Ireland. The Emerald Isles are truly a gorgeous place. The vistas are truly awe-inspiring and, hell, the cliffs of Moher are alone worth a post. I am not going to write the post, because, well, I am lazy but I stand by my initial assessment that the place is phenomenal.

But since I can bitch about anything, I had a few questions to the ancient Irish. Why? Why did you put stone walls EVERYWHERE? I do not mean here and there. I mean everywhere. I mean look at Inishmaan on the Aran Islands. (Photo courtesy of Chris Hill at Pixdaus)

You see those lines, they are all walls. The entire island is full of them. Why? I was perplexed my little toucans. And then I put my 984 years worth of brain cells to work. With the processing power far exceeding the earliest computers, my brain told me "Mate, why do jersey cows look like that?" I promptly discarded it's answer as useless and turned my keen eye towards the country side. More walls, but hidden here and there were ruined keeps and castles. Abandoned towers and look out points (all made with more rocks) festooned the landscape. And then it hit me.

The ancient Irish, were great builders. Certainly the predecessors to Ikea, given their skill at assembling said buildings with rock and nothing but a rock (save a pickaxe which can be likened to an ancient allen key) they built these buildings and walls everywhere. The problem was that no one told them about the good spots to put said walls and buildings. I like to think of the ancient Irish as a band of enthusiastic nomadic DIYers going from village to village constructing castles and keeps. To thank people for food, or to warn other tribes of nomadic DIYers from entering villages or even specific houses they built these walls. These facts seem to fit my observation. Consequently, any further research in to this subject is pointless and not required.

As I said, sometimes I shock myself.... WITH BRILLIANCE.

Stay tuned as I live-blog MT and my experiences with sight seeing in Ireland.


No comments:

Post a Comment