Port #2: Galway

I would have loved to share that I spent time in Galway, a college town on the west side of Ireland.  However, that simply wasn’t the case.  After tethering from the MV Explorer to the dock, I boarded a bus to participate in the Celtic Spirituality excursion.  It was fantastic.  Our tour guide actually wasn’t a tour guide, but an archeologist who was friends with the tour owner/operator.  Christie was layered knowledge upon knowledge by sharing about Celtic spirituality and early Christianity in Ireland.

We visited Poulnabrone, an ancient burial ground and holy site that was built the same time as the pyramid.  Although it is not as massive or extravagant as what is found in Egypt, while at the site I realized how limited our/my knowledge of history is.  We seem to center solely on the major civilizations.  However, people have been making things happen all over the world for ages.  Could the tribal communities in Ireland known about what was going on in Egypt at the time of the pyramids?  What kind of responsibility do we have to one another within our global community now, with the ability to know and know about the other so quickly?  Curious questions.

We also visited a number of Christian churches and pilgrimage sites from the 10th through 15th centuries.  You don’t find that kind of history in the USA.  It was fascinating to learn how the Christian faith was layered upon the pagan rituals and beliefs from this part of the world.  To take from Buddhism, it wasn’t a matter of swapping one faith for another, it was the notion if ‘transcending and including’.  You can see the Temple Cronnin, one of the earliest pilgrimage sites in the Barren of Ireland      

 

It was also wondrous to see how people in this limestone-filled environment created a way to survive.  Once seemed like unusable land was, with ingenuity and cultivation, developed in a fertile ground, which has and continues to sustain life.  You can see in the pictures below, a landscape (left) and a circular fort built from the limestone left after the glaciers melted.