Hey Honey I'm Home

Hello my lovelies, I'm back from a whirlwind tour of beautiful Ireland and my purse is definitely with me on wanting to get back to the car boot sales and the charity shops as it was a tad expensive!  I'm also having massive boot sale withdrawl symptoms after driving through Bristol and Wales on our way to the ferry and seeing all these boot sales on the go and knowing I wasn't allowed to stop and have my fix.

So a brief run through of my holiday.  We stayed at a fabulous cottage on the south east coast at a place called 'Our Lady's Island'.  This island has a small church which is the site of a pilgrimage every year in August. There is a beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary on the island as well as a shrine, I love things like this so I was out camera in hand as soon as I saw it:

As you can see the weather wasn't brilliant and rained pretty much the whole week - bummer.  If you are a fan of ruins there was a bit for you on Our Lady's Island too:

Although I thought it was a bit freaky with the cross upside down - this piece must have fallen from the main tower and landed like this.

I did smile on our entrance to the island where by some one had graffited over 'Our Lady' and replaced it with 'craggy' so we were amused for the day that we were staying on Craggy Island but the folks there obviously didn't see the funny side and the sign was replaced the next day before I got a picture!

We went to the beach where the opening scenes of 'Saving Private Ryan' were filmed:

Again please note the weather ;o)

I found some old graveyards (yes I have a weird fascination of old graveyards)

We visited Waterford Crystal:

This chandelier was in the cafe (the classiest cafe I've ever visited lol). This ceiling gem could be yours to take home for 30,000 euro - shame we couldn't fit it in the car, would have had two ;o)

We visited JFK's ancestral home:

JFK visited this home on the 27th June 1963 and then sadly was assassinated shortly after on the 22nd November 1963.  The young man who owns this property is a descendant of the Kennedy family and he showed us footage of his grandma and his mum meeting JFK at this his home.

Next up was a visit to Hook Lighthouse:

This is the oldest Lighthouse in the world - not looking bad on it either!

And my favourite visit was to Wicklow Gaol:

Now a little fact about me is that I'm fascinated by jails/gaols/prisons.  I swear I must have been banged up in prison for a crime in a previous life.  I made sure on our honeymoon in Hawaii that we had a stop off at San Francisco so I could visit Alcatraz and not to mention the scary and haunting visit to Fremantle Prison when we were backpacking in Australia. So Wicklow Gaol was top of my list of places to visit especially as I'd recently watched Ghost Hunters International and seen all the freaky happenings here.

Its dark and moody inside - right up my street.  If you want a bit of history about Wicklow Gaol check out here. There were plenty of scary figures:

As well as people dressed in costume popping out when you least expect it.  I was also foolish enough to walk into the solitary confinement cell which was pitch black:

Where by ever so funny hubby decided to shut the cell door - cue lots of screaming from me, not my finest hour but that cell was nasty especially as we were told that one man was locked up in there and forgotten, his dead body was found a good time later.

 Cell drawing.

Carving into the cell bed bench.

Finley was well behaved during his prison tour but as soon as we got to the second tier of the gaol he started really crying.  When we arrived at the exit we were asked how he got on, explaining the second tier meltdown the tour guide informed up that this was where the children were locked up, spooky!

On our way out we got to see a replica of 'The Treadwheel' which was a torturous punishment for the inmates:

They were made to walk on the wheel for an average of 48 steps per minute and this punishment could last up to 5 hours!  This wheel was not linked to any power generating device so was purely for punishment.

So that's enough of my holiday rambling - no charity shop surprises as only found 2 and they were both full of new stuff and one didn't even have a bric-a-brac shelf - sheesh! lol.

I will be catching up on all your blogs in the next few days promise :o)

Scarlett x