I love my town!

Today was __ ________'s Day and so the cathedral, the tower and the castle had free admission. A friend of mine from the department and I decided to be tourists and wander around (we're students and so free admission is always a bonus). The museum attached to the cathedral has tons of tombstones and fragments of Celtic crosses so I had a great time wandering around looking at inscriptions and the iconography. Brought me back to the days in Ireland recording gravestones. This picture is taken from the tower and you can actually see my house! Yes, this is where I live. What a wonderful place.

Another friend told us that on this day, the Freemason lodge opens its doors to the community. J and I decided that this would be a pretty cool thing to see. The people were super friendly and even let us take pictures inside. Of course, I have no idea what all the symbols mean but it was cool none the less. There was a great deal of tradition there and it was really neat to look at the pictures and all the paraphenalia. Plus it was nice to get out of the wind and the rain.

J had to be back for class for 4, but before we went back to the department, we headed to the castle. The castle is really just the shell of a castle but there are still some neat things associated with it. First, some of the little rooms associated with the outside walls are still standing (ie kitchen, guard rooms, etc), there is one room that contains a bottle-neck dungeon (a dug out room that is almost like a well. One would assume that prisoners were dropped in by rope?), and there are some tunnels that were false-started during a raid to try to head off tunnels that were being dug from the outside before they hit the inside. The coolest thing associated by far are the mine and counter-mine tunnels. These are long tunnels which did in fact head off the tunnel being dug from outside the castle. You can go down into them and wander around (if you are claustrophobic beware, I had to bend down pretty far to get through them). It was great. Really spooky since they aren't really well lit, and since it was rainy today there was water dripping down the sides and from the roof.

A great day all around. It's fun to have adventures in your own town and I'm definitely look forward to exploring more of the cool stuff we have here.