All Together Now Episode 2026 - Episode 2

Welcome back to this summer's joining of all our church-wide Sunday Schools. Today, we are joined by Skipp Johnson, who shares his stories about his trip to Ireland!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, I've been told that it's time to start, so uh let's just get together and just visit for a little while. I just got back on Tuesday from a trip, and uh Tim had asked me actually a couple weeks ago if I could be available for this, and I thought that'd be kind of fun and be a way to start beginning to process what I've done, and especially to do it with a community of people I really like. And so all is good, all is good. So it's really just a delight for me to be here. And um a different Sunday school hour. I'm not like gonna go into scripture, I'm not gonna be looking at the gospels, we're not gonna, you know, try to uh take apart any kind of understandings as much as um I just wrote down renewal from God's abundance, just the first thing that came to mind because kind of God's abundance, I've just really been very fortunate to be blessed with that uh for the last little while. And so to come and just be able to talk about it uh with people I enjoy and maybe tell you some stories that uh I hope you'll kind of learn something new or it will just intrigue you or tweak a little piece of curiosity that you carry out of here, uh that's that's that's a delight. That's all that I've been hoping for. So may we begin with a prayer. Gracious God, thank you for the gift of community. Being alone in this world is hard. Being in community is life-giving and joyful and energizing. May you be present in our time together and be with my comments and just with the thoughts and the enjoyment we have together. We're gathered in your name, in your house. Amen. So one thing that was kind of fun, I realized I could bring you some pictures. Um I have got lots of pictures. It's one of those things, you know, you go and you, oh, that's great. With digital, right? You just kind of, oh, that looks good, that looks good, that looks good. So I have got probably a couple of thousand pictures. Um, and so very quickly I said, Well, there's no way let me just choose some that are representative, or you know, kind of tell a bit of a story, or I can tell a story, and um share those with you guys. So that's just fantastic. I can do that. So I'm gonna see. I've been very helped by Miles and folks to get all this ready. Let's see. Ah, all right, good. Okay, this is me. Um I want to tell you that uh whenever I went to Ireland to tell you first where I was going. Um, I realized when I retired, archaeology has always been an avocation for me, just something I could do that's completely different from other things I did in my life, uh, be anonymous in a way and join with groups. And so uh when I retired, I realized oh, I'm not as limited by time as I was at one point. So I've started doing these international digs. And I kind of look around and I find these opportunities different places. And this year it was Ireland. And so I was in Ireland for seven weeks. I was uh did a study tour that started the dig really is up in the beginning in Ireland for two weeks, three weeks of a dig in a site called the Green Fort in Sligo, Ireland, and then Annie, my wife, flew over and then we traveled for two weeks. So you're gonna see just kind of a selection of some sites and some stories from that. Um, but this is me on the first day that I got there. Um this was the worst transatlantic flight I had ever had in my life. We all have had bad ones. Well, this was my bad one. This goes to the top. You know, it was with Delta, whom usually is very dependable for me, and they do great work. When I first got to the gate, it was already delayed. It was leaving, like supposed to leave at 8. Now it was gonna leave at 9. And I had a bus I had to catch at the airport in uh Dublin uh the next day, so I'm calculating well, I'll still be able to make that. So we get on the flight and we're all sitting there, and then uh they announce, well, we're having some problems with the door. Uh we're gonna work on that. And so that's another 30-minute delay. And so then we finally pull out on the tarmac, everything just is very slow, and then it's one of those moments, you know this moment, when the plane's there and you hear the engines, they start to build up, and you think, oh God, we're gone, this is gonna work. And then they go, and the pilot comes on and he says, I'm not sure how to share this with you, but uh, we've just learned that the cabin crew cannot work any longer. So we have to go back to the gate and exchange cabin crews. So back to the gate, waiting for the gate, gate comes out, crew gets off, and I'm I'm I'm going, Hey, couldn't you have checked your time card before? You know, but so they go off, we wait, we wait. Another crew finally comes on. So we're over three hours late taking off. This is gonna make me miss my bus. I'm like, you know, trying frantically with a little phone to kind of what can I change or whatever when I get there. So, anyway, fly to Dublin, get out in Dublin, got my bags, walking out, and as soon as I get out, you've heard of Ireland Irish weather, the sky just opens up right on top of me. I'm digging through my bag there in the rain, trying to find a raincoat, get it on, find out where the bus is, find it a place for the bus, and then they ended up, they had a they have an ex uh express bus from Dublin Airport. In Ireland, everything, you know, bus trains, a lot of travel, and the buses go everywhere. So there was a bus taking me to Sligo three hours away. But I found it, got on it. This is me on the bus, tired but relieved, almost gonna be there, right? So I'm going to Sligo, Ireland. I could not have picked it on a map before. It's in Northwest Ireland. It's actually a fairly large town, right on the coast, long history. The reason I was going there is because, and you guys all know this, I'm gonna tell things you already know, but you know, in the United States, we have states, state of Ohio, state of Georgia. In Ireland, they have counties. County Kerry, County Sligo. This is a large county, and Sligo was the kind of the largest city in the county. They have a university there called Atlantic Technological University, which is kind of a consortium part of a large group of schools. And this was like sponsoring what I was going to be doing. And so what happens is the students are gone. And so I'm in student housing, move in, kind of pull my stuff up, you know, got a place to stay. And so then the next day I get up and walk down to the campus, and this is Sam Moore. Sam Moore is an archaeologist. His specialty is megalithic archaeology, megalithic just meaning big rocks, right? Um, it's archaeology going way back to when things were built out of huge stones. Stonehenge is a megalithic monument. Turns out Sligo County has the largest percentage of megalithic architecture anywhere in Ireland, and one of the largest uh percentages of archaeology from Ireland. So you have every kind of era of archaeology illustrated here. And Sam is one of the experts in this area, so he was going to be showing us around. So I was delighted. There are about 10 of us in this group. Some are uh much younger than me. One gentleman is older than I am. He was uh a mining engineer by trade, and he was retired, and he just loved this part of Ireland and he wanted to kind of come and see some things. So we're gonna be traveling together, and Sam is welcoming us and kind of give us an introduction to what we're gonna see. So this is Sam showing our group, we're up at the Green Fort. The Green Fort is gonna be where the dig is going to happen. It's in the middle of Sligo town. It's a large earthen fort that kind of looms over the city. So when you're up here, you can see everything. Uh this was built around 1600. Now, at least in my mind, I thought, well, why build an earthen fort? Why not a castle or something of stone, right? Well, it turns out in 1600 was kind of the turning point for castles. Artillery had just been introduced. Cannon was starting to be used in English armies. And it was realized that if you were in this stone castle, no matter how impregnable, if you had artillery coming up against you, it was going to fall down. It was going to get knocked over. So suddenly this new science of earthen fortification started in Italy, spread across the country, the Europe. And this is a large earthen fortification. So when you fire a cannonball at it, it just sticks in it, right? It just kind of actually reinforces the sides. This was built, history that I really didn't know much about. Um my guess is you are all probably experts on the Jacobite and the Weamite Wars. I'm sure you know all about them and could lecture me. But you know, um, what had happened was uh England did not want a Catholic king. James I, James was followed by uh Charles I, who lost his head. Uh there was a restoration, and Charles II came back, and then Charles II, he died, did not really have anyone to take over to be a king, and so he his brother became the king, James II. Unfortunately, James II was Catholic, married a Catholic, had a Catholic child, and the Parliament of England at this point said, Yeah, we're done with Catholics. And so they asked him, please, they the Parliament threw him out. He went to France, which was Catholic. He gathered forces, they kind of came through Ireland because Ireland was Catholic, sweeping more people up, and he thought, I'm gonna go back to England from Ireland and I'm gonna conquer it. William and Mary, who were now the rulers in England, invited back by the Parliament because they were Protestant. Religion was a big deal, big deal. They come over to Ireland. There's a big battle called the Battle of the Boyne, and this fort, the Green Fort, was built because it was thought, my gosh, this is going to spread across the country. This was a Protestants were all inside here with their armies. This went back and forth, back and forth, and it was there all through the 1600s. Um, you've heard of Oliver Cromwell. He came through here, he occupied this. This fort saw some action, had cannon lining all around, pretty kind of interesting place, and you can kind of see everywhere, all around you. So this is the first thing we walked up to the first day. And then Sam took us to a passage tomb. This is what Sam was really kind of just salivates about. Uh this is just kind of out and about. I mean, these are these are fairly common in this county. This dates back probably to, um, did I write that one down? Maybe I didn't. But we're talking, this is BC. This is probably, you know, I don't know, 1000 BC, maybe a little bit earlier than that. Uh these were passage tombs that were built out of these large standing stones in which you kind of walk down them. Uh, then you your bodies are put in them, they were huge, and they're all over the county. We'd be on them. It was this amazing privilege because we would go meet on the campus at nine o'clock in the morning, a minibus would pull up, we get on, and for the whole day, Sam is just taking us around, showing us archaeology. And he would get out and he would know everything about this place and be explaining, okay, this is where the bodies were, this is how it was used. And then when we'd be on the bus going down the highway, he'd point on over to a hill and go, Oh, there's one over there, oh, there's one over there. This is like this archaeology everywhere that you look. Really kind of impressive. This is Sligo Abbey. This is Dominican, dates back to the 1200s in Sligo. Again, there's, you know, you've all had probably had the experience here in the States, things are old if they're like 100 years, right? You know, you get back 200 years going, whoa, that's way back. You know, sometimes 300. Oh my God, you know, 1700s. Uh that's nothing, right? All right. Over here, this is like, you know, 1200s, Dominican Abbey, been there. Right downtown in Sligo, no longer used, but it's got this long history that you walk through it. Uh, it's also back in its history, it was consecrated ground. And occasionally epidemics would pass through Sligo or deaths would happen. And so everybody wanted to be buried at Sligo Abbey and the consecrated ground. In fact, they had a couple of epidemics that were so difficult they had to bring in cartloads of dirt to build up the earth in the cemetery so that they had room for more bodies. And so some of the sides, yeah, do you can do that. Yeah, try that, Jan. Thank you. I didn't even think about that. So, anyway, the the abbey had so many bodies within it that they kind of kept bones kept emerging from the uh the ground. Um, John Wesley, a name we know, um, did um one of his preaching tours, he went through Ireland and he went to Sligo, and this was in 1760. And he wrote in his diary, went to Sligo Abbey today, kept tripping over the bones and the skulls. Uh, there were so many. When they finally cleaned this out to get it ready, and kind of as as a ruin you could show, they had wagon loads. I think like 500 wagon loads of bones were carried away from so many bodies had been buried here. But it's amazing history, you know. It's one of the things with the building is it never stays the same, even maybe for your own house. Renovations are done, additions are added. So it's the same with all these kind of buildings and the tombs. The tomb may have started as one looking tomb, then it gets expanded. The abbey had been expanded, things have been changed, but it's one of the kind of landmarks there in Sligo County. It's also I wanted it to remind me to just share a really quick story with you that I really enjoyed. One of the epidemics that swept through Sligo in 1832 was a cholera epidemic. It came overseas. They're right on, they have like a harbor, so there were ships coming in, and somewhere it got into the city. It actually swept across Ireland, but Sligo was really devastated more than any other place was. There was a young woman, um, 14 years old at the time, named Charlotte Thornley. And Charlotte later grew up when she was an adult, and she wrote an essay, a memory of this, that's been uh been kept. But she talks about how every day there would be somebody coming to your house and knocking on the door and saying, You need a coffin? Do you need a coffin? Because so many people were dying, and it so bothered her, just her sensibilities and just every day just waiting for that, you need a coffin. So that she went and confronted this guy and said, I'd never come here again. You know, you're this is horrible, this is a terrible situation, you're making it worse. And he looked at her and he goes, No coffin for you. She talked about her neighbors that they were out visiting with one night. There were like six neighbors. The next morning there were three. Uh, three of them had died in the night. And one of the things about cholera, nobody really understood it well. And so people were like, when if you'd find a body on the road, somebody had fallen, you wouldn't touch it. You'd get sticks and move it off the road to get it away from you. Uh you couldn't leave town because crowds would kind of keep you. No, don't leave, don't you're gonna spread it. Um she knew of a couple, and well, one of the things about cholera too, it would throw people into kind of a stupor state. So you sometimes couldn't tell if they were really what had passed or not. Well, she had a story she told that there was a couple she knew, um, man and woman, and that the woman became ill with cholera, and it was causing pains and things in her body, and apparently there was some kind of abdominal pain. And so her husband had this red, long red sash that he took and he wrapped it around her just to kind of make it tighter, so she felt a little bit of relief. And he in the early morning she was moaning, she was horrible. He took her to the cholera hospital there in Sligo. Now, hospital is almost too much of a term because doctors were dying, nurses were dying, they were bringing people out of the jails to be attendants because they just people that could look after the bodies, look after the the folk, the ill. Well, he got her to the hospital, they took her in and put her in a bed, they had a bed for her, and he went home. He came back that afternoon to just check on her, and she wasn't there. And he confronts the nurses, the attendants, and they say, I'm sorry, she passed. And uh he he was just beyond upset and said, Well, where where is she? We've put her out with the with the dead. And he goes out back, and there's like a shelter with bodies stacked like cordwood sitting there. And he looks at them all, the bodies, and then in between the bodies, he sees the red of the sash that he had put on his wife, and he digs through the bodies as carefully as he can, and he reaches the sash, and he pulls out his wife, and he extracts her from all that, and he holds her, and then his wife moans that she had not died. In fact, she recovered, and Charlotte Thornley talks about how she would encounter them in the years to come, but still alive. Still she moved back to kind of thriving again. Well, these memories haunted Charlotte Thornley as a 14-year-old, and they haunted her as a 20-year-old. All her life she remembered these, the all these things that had happened. She later got married, and she would sometimes tell these stories to her son, who was very influenced by him. And her son's name was Brahm, and her husband's last name was Stoker, so her son was Brahm Stoker. So it's believed that these stories helped him form the ideas of Dracula from Sligo in Ireland, which was amazing. New story for me completely. So that's there's the Abbey. This is um I don't want to give you the right name for it. This is Glenoff called Glenoff Horseshoe. Uh it's outside of Sligo. They used to do mining up on the sides there. The cloud would come in, and it was just this really mystical kind of sight. There used to be miners that lived out here. There was uh miners that would go up and down. We actually, when we were there, we saw people, two people climbing up the side of this. I don't know how they were doing it. They were on all fours, just kind of, I don't know where they were going, but it looked kind of spooky to me. Uh but this was just an amazing kind of sight right outside of Sligo. Sam here is taking us to uh a beach, and this is a beach. Um, this is another story that I was not aware of. The year 1588, the Spanish Armada was coming to England and getting ready to knock the crap out of them. Um well the English won, but it wasn't so much their navy that really did it. The Navy had something to do with it, but the weather was really, really awful for the Spanish Armada. And they ended up, the winds blew them all the way around England. And when they realized where they were, they were trying to come back, you know, around Ireland and then move back towards Spain. Unfortunately, a hurricane hit right at that moment, and it blew the ships into the rocks, it started wrecking the ships, and a number of the ships wrecked in the bay right outside of Sligo. And Sam was standing there with us saying, as you're looking at this beach, I want you to imagine a thousand Spanish soldiers washed up here, lying on the beach. He goes, and the ones that are alive, the folk that live here are robbing them or killing them. Others are being arrested by English authorities and taken away to be hung. And a few are sneaking into the sand dunes to hide and are gonna try to make their way across Ireland and find a way back to Spain. A story I knew nothing whatsoever about. Incredible. There's some amazing stories, and there's apparently there's a group in Ireland that really recognizes the Spanish Armada, remembered the memories, and they're kind of joined with a uh a co-group in Spain that gets together uh every year to remember the Spanish Armada and tell stories. And uh there is uh actually a uh a diary kept by one Spanish soldier who survived, and he makes it back to Spain, and so he tells the story of how he tried to get across Ireland and uh survive after the Spanish Armada had wrecked. Right behind, uh you can't really tell from this picture, but uh maybe oh 200 feet from Sam and where we're standing there is this ruin. This was a church from the 12th century, the ruins. It's on top of a church from the 10th century, may go back further than that. And one reason I've got it here, I just like the picture, but also um, this is everywhere. These litter the countryside. Sam was telling us about old churches and things. Old churches there are common. They end up getting overrun by ivy, and I didn't include a picture of that here, but ivy ends up holding the building together. And they have, and after a while you can't even see a church anymore simply because all the underbrush and the ivy. And these are like litter and dot the countryside. And he Sam says, nobody knows what we're gonna really do with these because they're really too many to try to keep, but they're all historic. Um, but this is really kind of a good symbol of what Ireland is is like Ireland in 1841. The English did a census of Ireland and there were eight million people. Another census was done in 1911, and there were four million people. Today, Northern Ireland and Ireland proper together is seven and a half million. They have less people in Ireland today than they had in 1841. Now, why? And why did they? The famine killed a million, million and a half people who starved to death on the streets, on the roads. Others, they were able to get money, they became kind of you know, apprentice to someone, uh, they became bonded servants to travel with people across. This Irish diaspora started there, and it's had other periods, it's also happened, and so the Irish went all over the world. There is a huge Irish component in Brazil, they're in Australia, they're everywhere. So when St. Patrick's Day comes, one reason it's all kind of this amazing holiday is yeah, the Irish are everywhere. They all remember their heritage that they came from Ireland. Now, I knew some of that, I didn't know the population piece. It's one of the few countries that has less people today than they had in 1841. But the other thing I did not know, um the English were not kind to the Irish. Um I I was told uh somebody said an easy way to think about Irish history are three dates. The year 400 is really uh before that is prehistory. The first historical accounts we have start around 400. The year 800, roughly, the Vikings came, which by the way brought coinage before then. They dealt in cows, all right? That's how things were evaluated. And then the other year was 1200. I believe it's like 1180 was when the English came to Ireland. Now, what happened was there was uh uh an Irish kind of lord, uh they were on their own country doing their own thing, who kind of got thrown out by some by some people he was uh uh enemies with, uh families, uh families, dramas, all that kind of thing. So he gets this idea, I'm gonna go to England and ask for some help. So he goes to England and he asks for some help as Henry II. And Henry II, well, who wants to go? Some some lords and knights decided they were gonna go, one being a gentleman named Strongbow. They came over to Ireland and they never left. They got there and said, Oh, this isn't too bad. So the English started a colonization program in Ireland and what they called a plantation program. And they would, when they'd go over and they'd kind of conquer a little area, they'd give the land away to their soldiers or to people back in England, and they kept pushing the Irish further and further away from any fertile ground, from anything where there was any kind of living. And then remember also the Irish are Catholics. The English, because of remember the Tudors and all this, they are Protestant. And so this religious peace starts up, which still is there today. And it was it's fascinating how this lives in the minds of the Irish, because if you're just kind of talking about it and you mention the Irish and the British in the same sentence, they'd kind of look at you wondering where you're gonna go with that, because of the memories. All of that was to say, in 1845, 47, 48, when that famine was hitting, it was not because there wasn't enough food. They had enough food. But the English that controlled production of food were shipping the food for sale to other places and did not give it to the people and allow them to starve. And they just wanted to keep business as usual and to not do anything. Many of you have have uh are familiar with Jonathan Swift, who wrote Gulliver's Travels, but he was also this amazing writer and lived in Dublin. He was the dean of one of the cathedrals there at one point, and you probably have heard he wrote an essay that was published, and it was called A Modest Proposal. And in the essay, if you know about it, he's proposing how we use the Irish for food, and how one baby can serve a family for X number of days, and we can produce this, this. It was obviously it was satire, but it was to make the point to the English in in charge in in England. Look how we're treating these people. We're they're they're worse than just animals. We what are we doing? So even today, the Irish, you see them just change expressions when you start talking about the English because of the history. And it's not just the famine. You know, they've been there since um uh around 1200, and they've been in charge. And they've been the ones that have exploited the Irish people, pushed them away, banned their religion, would not allow them to gather for prayer, for mass, and so there's a huge movement there that were these secret places they would go to meet a priest, to have mass, because the English would have arrested them. And then, of course, we know how this is ultimately going to happen, and I'll show you an example in a second. But this is like an abandoned kind of village where they're gone. Still owned, by the way, though places like this. Sam told us, he said, well, they're still owned by the family that left there. So what happens is families like folk like us in the U.S. that have Irish ancestors will go back and visit their old places and sometimes fix them up. But this was just this was evocative to me, just how this looked. This is Sam just kind of leading us on the trail. We're at right at the uh the ocean here. Uh Sam, lovely guy, had such a good time with Sam. Sam would take us to these places, and he goes, I want to show you some of my special romantic places that I've enjoyed. And so I would got to know Sam and I said, Sam, was it the same woman that you took these places? He goes, No way, no, no. So this is one of Sam's places that he said he would, right where I am, he had a picnic spot, and he would bring uh sweethearts here and just kind of entice them in whatever stories he wanted to tell. But this is also just an amazingly uh for me wonderful photo of this is what the coast looks like. You know, these just kind of drop offs into nothing. And also it's very interesting, you know, in the States, if if you've got this, you've got a guardrail, right? All right, ain't no guardrail. You know, you just walk along this path, it's just kind of right there, and there it just kind of drops off into nothingness. Now here's our group. We're this is the same same day, we're going a little further. You can't, I want to bring this because that's our group, we're right on the coast. You see that kind of rising, that ridge way in the back, the mountain. You can't probably see it from where you are. I'm I'm sorry for that. But if you were to look at it very close, there's looks like there's a button on top of that you could press. There's a little bump right on the top, it's not flat across. That is a tomb called Queen Maeve's tomb. And this, you can see it from anywhere in Sligo County. And way out in the ocean, you look and you see this ancient carn that dates from the Bronze Age that's on top of this mountain. Uh, it's kind of like when you walk around, you see Stone Mountain, it kind of looms there. Well, anywhere here in Sligo, boom, you see Queen Maeve's carn. It's an unexcavated tomb. It's never been kind of looked into. It just kind of looms over everything and just kind of makes a statement. Again, that's Queen Maeve. You can see it a little better here. You might be able to see the button on top of the ridge behind the horses. That again, that's Queen Maeve's tomb. It's just you're anywhere and you look around. Oh, there it is. There it is. And it's just a reminder of this ancient history that is always just kind of looking down on you. You know, here we are in 2026, and Bronze Age history is staring at you the whole the whole time. So, of course, we had to go to the top of Queen Maeve's to go to the top of that. And there's a trail, it's one of the favorite trails in Sligo. People kind of go up. Um you can't see it really well because I'm and you're unfortunately I wish this was much larger, but there's a trail here, and there's some people there, and I'm further up. It's if you've ever climbed Stone Mountain, you know, this is it's not like that, except maybe ten times as long. Uh it's just a longer walk, but a climb to kind of get up to it. But what's incredible is you get this amazing view of the countryside of Ireland, and this is really Ireland. They talk about the greens of Ireland, yeah. They're just all these different shades of Ireland that I had never really seen before. So we climb up to Quinn Maeves, and this is this is this here. We got there to the very top. Never been excavated. Uh Sam said they're looking to get some equipment in that can look through the rock and look for chambers within it, because they're pretty much pretty sure it's like this is another uh passage tomb, and that they're pretty sure that there's there's space inside it, and there are things that are inside it as well. Um for Sam it's like, oh, another megalithic structure. I mean, they're just kind of, oh, yeah, ho-hum, here we go. Uh, but this one's kind of cool just because it looms over uh the countryside. Uh next day we're walking, Sam takes us to a place called Carakel. Uh these are tombs, there are like 14 of them, these long ridges that are high, and at the end of each of the ridge there is a carn like this, bronze age, dates back. They've been excavated, so they've found bones in them, and they've found they've gone inside of them. Um but there some of them are open, and some of them you can go into, and which is very cool. And they're looming and they all are kind of oriented in one direction. And the direction they're oriented toward is there's another megalithic cemetery in the middle, way down there, miles and miles away. But it's as if, as the ages passed, there was originally one tomb that was significant. This is long before Queen Mae's tomb, and then other tombs over centuries that are built are looking and oriented toward that. And so the whole thing becomes one of the most important megalithic cemeteries in Europe, um, in the world for that sense. Another look, you can kind of kind of you can see they had uh the uh the pieces there and the stone. This is pretty much what it looked like. Uh the one thing, big pieces of kind of white uh quartz are scattered around. It used to perhaps they think be covered in these, but then people have taken those away. This is me and Sam. This was just, I was kind of in my element. This was like a very fun day for me to be able to be up there, kind of, and to climb up there and see these things. And this is kind of inside looking out. Uh inside it's it's dry, it's not wet. The construction was such that water does not leak in. And so Sam was telling us a story how he'd been up there and kind of taken shelter in these from a hailstorm or from a rainstorm that you're absolutely fine when you're inside. The one thing, though, uh uh about these in general, because of all these megalithic structures, um, there's kind of uh a new agey kind of feel to some of these things. In other words, people that are kind of uh into ley lines and kind of special resonances with rocks and things, will gather here in different places. One of the tombs we came up on, uh, there are all these people that were standing in the midst of the passage tomb, and they were standing there, and their arms were positioned in certain ways, and they weren't moving. And I'm going to say, what the hell is that? And uh, it it was this group there, there's there are tours that are just special, kind of new agey tours that just kind of help to align you with the special mystical elements. Because you know, this is Celtic, this goes back, the Celtic mythologies all get caught up in this, and there are people that kind of live that out. Well, and this is in the tomb that I was checking out right here on Carakiel. Uh, I found this lying in a corner. Now, this is what what a real what it looks like, just to show you, this is St. Bridget's Cross. This is uh the official symbol for St. Bridget, who was one of the biggest saints in uh Ireland. She lived in probably 600, 700s, a lot of stories about her, but this really kind of cool cross, you know, it's like a little weaving together of uh of straw or or for grasses, and it's become kind of a she's seen as a crossover between the saints and like the gods or goddesses of the time. And so you'll find Saint Bridget's crosses on these really interesting places just hidden away, tucked away. And so in the back of the tomb here at Carakiel, there's a St. Bridget's cross. Somebody has tucked away in there. Uh people come up here and sleep, right? And have special times of contemplation and everything. Um this is PJ. He'd been a student of Sam's at one time. I wanted to share this with you because it raised this was uh for me, this was really fun. It raises a question. So, what do you do if you got a castle on your land? Uh, you know, you're a farmer and you got some fields, and there's a castle out there. You know, what do you do with it? Well, that's PJ's dilemma, right? Okay. This is a castle from I think the 1400s, and uh PJ found out that it was, well, he knew it was there, obviously, but he's trying to conserve it. But what happens is you try to conserve it, there are departments you have to go through to get permission to do this, then permission to do that, and then apply for a grant. And so the whole bureaucratic understanding of the world is right there if you have a castle on your land. So he is doing this amazing job. He gave us a tour of it and he showed it to us, and then he kind of showed us this is uh one of the corner buildings. He's restored a lot of it. He's kind of had some professionals there, he's gotten grants for it. It's this amazing, I mean, really, a castle in your backyard? That's kind of cool, right? Um, so he says, Well, people now kind of want to come see it. Well, that's another department, all right, who are gonna be accessible and do the parking lot and do, you know, and he said, he told me, he said, Skip, he goes, I can't get insurance. Nobody will insure a castle. Because what if they're going up some stairs and they fall and all this? So it was really this wonderful kind of uh uh for me example of bureaucratic snaws of what can happen, even if something as cool as a castle is in your backyard. Um this was just a typical day in Sligo, uh, rainy, stormy, and uh Sam has taken us out. There's so much Irish mythology about what happened in the country, and he's taken us out to a place where some of this great battle took place in mythology, and he's he's reading and telling the stories and showing us all the things that happened. And then along the way, he takes us by this. This is a tomb, a passage tomb. They put that on top of standing rocks. I don't know how they did it, but you see how stories of giants and the mythology all kind of built up about how these things were possibly done. And uh that was just amazingly impressive to see that. Um holy wells, water was always is is sacred anyway, it's because it's it's necessary for life, and they have holy wells all over Ireland. There's something like I think 450, maybe more than that, and that uh this was the holy well here, and this was also a place where they would come and have communion. It's far enough away from the authorities that the Catholics would all gather, and there are people who use this all the time. It's still a place you come. Uh there's a there's a rock in which St. Patrick kneeled on, right? Because there are kneel impressions where St. Patrick did that. St. Patrick is given a lot of credit for bringing Christianity to Ireland in the 500s. It's thought there are probably people earlier than St. Patrick that did this, but he obviously gets the credit, and there are probably 90% of the wells are St. Patrick Wells or St. Bridget Wells. Uh only a couple of pictures to show you here. This is the dig. You can't really tell there's a security fence all the way around it, which we had to erect, carry up there, and put up, keep people from tripping on the trench. That's the group. Uh you're there and you're on the high point, the green fort in the middle of the Sligo. Rain comes by, gets cold, sun comes out, you get hot, repeat, repeat, repeat the entire day. And uh we were kind of digging in the trench. The trench that I was digging on was this one. Uh it got kind of deep. I was digging it fairly deep, and I told the archaeologist, uh, Marion, I said, there's a there's some kind of a slight odor coming out of this. And she says, I don't smell that. It rained overnight. This was the next day, and uh you can't see it quite in this picture, but there was kind of like a film over the water that was seeping in. And they came over to me and the smell was perforating, it was over the whole dig. And they looked and they said, Skip, we know what your pit is. It's a cess pit. Um the the problem was we were at the lowest point in the on the dig there, and so this would refill every 25 minutes, and so we're constantly kind of bailing that out in the midst of the dig. This next picture, just you can do your own interpretation of. This is this is up on the dig. Um the gentleman who's arrested me is Billy, who is a sergeant in the police force in Sligo County. Um, just became a guy that I got to know a little bit. We had volunteers that would come up and help us on the dig. And uh Billy came up and he'd been working with us, and he came back another day with his uniform on. I said, Look, just for fun, would you arrest me? And so he goes, sure, let's do that. Lots of things going on in the area. This is out at just a few miles from uh Sligo, because again, it's it's on the coast, so you have like a bay and places and and and seashore places. This is a um a sea shanty uh celebration that was going on for a weekend, and these are three gentlemen, oddly enough from Germany, that are singing English sea chant. Chanties and and the this is in a small uh uh Irish church, and everybody is singing. I mean, you I wish I had sound. You have to imagine, you know, uh everybody, you know, what do you do with the drunkans? What do you do? And everybody belting that out as loud as they can. It was really quite fun. Um I mentioned about English and the Irish. There was no place you could go where there wasn't some conversation or or or uh connection. Um this is a place that's almost like a valley forge in Irish history. This is Kilmanham Jail, which is in Dublin. And this was built in um, I've got it written down somewhere. I think it was 1600 or 1700. Um I don't know where do I have it. Well, I think it was like around around 1790. Uh it held mostly um, it held petty criminals. They had pictures of like women, children that were put in here for like stealing bread, those kinds of things. But it was started to be used as a political prison. And this is like sacred in the memory of Ireland because uh there was a rebellion in uh 1916 called the Easter Rebellion, in which the Irish uh people that wanted independence for Ireland were trying to initiate, you know, let's let's go, let's go. And they thought if we rise up in Dublin, people will flock to us and they will join with us, and then we will take our country and have independence from the English, right? From the English. Now, in 1916, what else was going on? World War I. The world is at war, the English, they think they'll be too distracted to mess with us. We're gonna have this successful rebellion. Well, they didn't. Eastern, 1916, they had too few people, maybe 1,500, 2,000. They took over the GPO, the General Post Office, which was a symbol of British authority, took it over. I mean, we're talking guns. I mean, there were like, I think, 450 civilians that died, a lot of soldiers died. The British, when they got word of what really was going on, they sent 10,000 soldiers who are now trained. World War I'm going on, and these 10,000 soldiers come into Dublin and they just kind of smush. They arrest the leaders who surrender, and at Kilmanham Jail, their cells are all there where they were kept, and the tour guide will tell you a story about each of them, and then they will walk you out into this great open area, and they'll show you where they were executed. And how the trials were just kind of show trials done very quickly. One of the leaders, McConnell, he would have been wounded and he couldn't walk, and they brought him by ambulance to the jail and brought him into the area to be executed, and because he couldn't stand, they strapped him on a chair and shot him in the chair. Well, that story almost every Irish person knows. And in Ireland, when that happened, even though the Irish did not respond to the re to the call for rebellion, they were so appalled by what the English had done and how they showed themselves. That was a turning point in Irish history. And soon after that came the trouble, the uh the Irish wars between themselves, almost a civil war about who's going to be in charge, the English or the Irish, or we're gonna have home rule. And the Irish became independent in the early 1920s. But uh Easter 1916 is remembered, and this jail is seen almost like a shrine. When you go there, you hear it in the stories that are told about all the folk that were there. This is Christ's Cathedral in Dublin. This is St. Patrick's Cathedral. I just thought the floors were like amazing there, just to kind of look at those. Uh I a tip for those who go internationally sometime, you want to go to cathedral. A great day to go to cathedral to visit is on a Sunday morning because they have services at these, these are operating parishes. And if you go to church there, they clear everybody else out, and there's actually a service that goes on and there's a sermon, and then for about 30 to 45 minutes after the service is over, the place is just empty and you can wander and enjoy the place. This is Annie, my wife, being turned away for uh being a heretic. No, actually. Uh we just got to know, talk to one of the pastors there. This is at uh Christchurch. Uh, some of you know this, you've probably seen this before. This is the long room at Trinity College. Uh, this library, Trinity College was founded uh by Queen Elizabeth, and she founded it uh as a Protestant school with the idea that, oh, we're gonna send out Protestant teachers and uh ministers all across Ireland, and they're gonna make everybody Catholic. Uh, Catholics were not allowed to go here at all, and that uh ultimately it did not work out too well. It's still mostly a Catholic country, and but Trinity College uh is still there and is amazing. Another tip if you ever go to Dublin in the summer, you can stay at Trinity College in student accommodations. They're available, and it's really terrific. You're right in the old buildings when you're there. So we enjoyed that. I thought the globe that hovers there, right? This art this is a piece of artwork, really cool looking in the midst of the library. Of course, this is also people go to Trinity College to go see this. This is the Book of Kells, illuminated manuscript, maybe the most famous in the world. Uh, year 800, a bunch of monks did this in Iona off the coast of uh Scotland. Uh, because of Vikings and such, they went over to Ireland to a small city, small village called Kells, and there it was kept until the bishop that oversaw Kells gave it over to the keeping of Trinity College, which now has it. And they changed the page, I think it's either once a month or once a week. They changed the page, and every page is illuminated on how they've done the gospels. Um my wife kind of posing by this is considered one of the benefits the contributions of Ireland to world art, these giant Irish high crosses with the circle around them, they're only found in Ireland. And so they do this. This is one of the largest ones that you'll find in Ireland. Every segment has scenes from the Bible that are illustrated or a saint. So you can really, for those that are illiterate, it's like a stained glass. You go up and you look at the cross, and the cross tells you the stories. You know the stories and you go, oh yeah, that's when so-and-so. Oh yeah, this was Adam and Eve over here. So the stories are told by the stone. That was pretty amazing. That was just a cemetery that you had to drive out to uh about an hour and a half north of uh Dublin. And of course, you know, driving is not really great fun uh when you're overseas, especially when the roads get narrower and narrower and narrower, but this was worth getting to. Uh, there are two um UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Ireland proper. One is at Newgrange, some of you may have been there. This is Newgrange. This again, this is Bronze Age, dates way back. Uh this is a huge mound with a passage tomb in the middle of it, which you can walk into. This is like the entrance. They do not let you take pictures inside. Uh, I think it's because they simply have too many people taking pictures. But you go into it and in the middle of it is like a cruciform. There are passages, or not passages, but little cubic areas to each side with carvings and such on it. And you probably know of Newgrange, you might have heard of it, because on the winter solstice, every year, uh the sun, when it rises, it casts a dagger of light right down the middle of the entrance to this tomb and illuminates these different chambers and these certain certain inscriptions. If you'd like to go, they have a worldwide lottery in which you can uh put your name in and they draw names uh to go in there every year, those who get to go. And you get to bring somebody with you if you get to go. So if you get it, ask me. Okay. We went out to the uh the Aran Islands that are just off the coast, the west coast of uh Ireland. Stayed two nights. Um we went we went up to um this fort called Dune Angus, and you have to walk up to to get there, and then you go there. This is old, this is like again 400s or earlier, and it's it's the dry stone method of building walls, so there are no mortar, and you've got wall, wall, wall, ocean. And there is no guardrail on the ocean side. There is only a 300-foot drop. And as one guide said to me, he was saying, he says, you know, the proper position when you're close to the edge here in Ireland is on your belly. And so I was on my belly. I mean, you talk about vertical, I mean, you're looking there, I mean, it just, and there's wind swooping by, and you're walking over toward the edge. And there's, I mean, I'm thinking, this would never happen in America. Never. And I'm just wondering, and you get close to the edge. So I I I would got down and I put off my arms with a camera, click, so took that picture just to kind of have something to remember it by. It was an experience just to be able to do that. Uh, another experience, they had a place on Aaron Island called the Wormhole, which was uh another place where the ocean kind of came in. You cross a moonscape to kind of get across. We're with this lovely couple from Ireland named Patty and Mary, and they walk with us, and you're going out, and you're right down there where the ocean is just crashing up against uh the rocks, and it was just impressive. Uh, I wanted to mention uh Pat and Mary really quickly because they were lovely. People were just talking to them. We're walking back, you have to kind of walk very carefully. We get back to where we are, and there was this van was going to pick us up, and there was this flatbed wagon that was just there. Just in and uh Pat was leaning next to her and goes, Ah, Skip, you ought to get up and do us a dance. You know, and I said, Oh, yeah, you know, I don't dance, he goes, maybe you. And he goes, Okay. So he climbed up on this dadgum flatbed thing and started doing an Irish dance for like five or seven minutes. And I'm like, wow. And then he goes, Oh, I used to teach dancing. Uh Iron Aaron Islands again. I got up early from where we were staying and walked to one of the higher points. This is a church, dates back to the 700s, 600s. Um ruins just still are are there, but you can kind of see just the it's all up by itself, isolated, and they're also you can't really see them well from where you are, but they're little kind of break uh stone walls everywhere in the distance. All right, just about done. Turned out this was a uh this this gal, um uh Ashlyen and her husband Joe. Uh I'm Ashley was on the dig with me. Turned out when I showed her a map of where we were going, she said I live only five minutes from there. So we arranged to kind of meet them and have dinner. Um Irish music's a real thing. You kind of hear it in the pubs and such. I don't want to finish up with you guys. Uh, one of the most fun places we went to, I mentioned two UNESCO World Heritage sites. One is Newgrange, the other is called Skellig Michael. You actually probably know about Skellig Michael if you don't even remember. You have. Skellig Michael was used for scenes in one of the Star Wars, two of the Star Wars films. It's where Luke goes off into retreat, a planet far, far away, and Ray tracks him down finally. Uh, this is Skeleg Michael. On Skellig Michael, there was a monastery community from the year 600 until 1200. 600 years of a community of monks that lived here. Um you have to take up 618 stone steps to get to where it is, and you are surrounded by puffins as you walk up, who just kind of stare at you as you kind of go by, going, what are you doing now? Steps are pretty high, you've got to be kind of careful as you go up, because they're I don't know, from they're pretty old. They've been there for a while. And I just kind of it's just kind of cool. This is a cross that dates back to the time. These are the buildings that were there for uh the monks. And then this is one of the last things which we did. This is just a castle. This actually was attacked in 1598. And I mentioned 1600 is the year where uh castles became kind of, they're not going to work anymore. This was impregnable until the Duke of Essex, Essex under the Queen's orders, Queen Elizabeth, came over, attacked it, and he had two cannon, and he started firing off, and then the castle surrendered. So it was the last of the castles uh really that happened anywhere in England. And this is just my wife and I just kind of saying, thanks for listening just to some meanderings and some stories. Thank you for giving me a chance to relive some of this, guys. All right, good to be with you.