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The tourists queue to kiss a stone. Behind it stands the story of Gaelic Munster and how it fell. This book opens with a clear timeline of the castle, from the 1446 keep to the great gardens, then turns to the MacCarthys who built it and ruled the south. You will learn where the word "blarney" came from, why the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 broke the old order, and how the Munster Plantation put Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser on Cork land. Thirteen chapters on the castle and the country it belonged to. Illustrated. Digital download (PDF).
All ten books, including this one, come together in The Cork Stories Collection for €24.99, a saving of almost €35 on buying them one at a time.
What's inside:
Prologue: The Queue
1. The Castle in Brief
2. The MacCarthys and Gaelic Munster
3. The Wider Lords of Munster
4. Building and Defending the Castle
5. A Country of Towers
6. The Bards and the Friars
7. The Stone and the Word
8. The Lords and the Crown
9. Kinsale, 1601
10. The Plantation, Raleigh and Spenser
11. The Long Defeat
12. The Wild Geese and After
13. The Tourist Castle
Epilogue: Back at the Bottom of the Stairs
63 pages, illustrated.
From the opening pages:
On any morning from April to October a queue forms outside the gates of Blarney Castle, eight kilometres northwest of Cork city, and it is an international queue. The visitors stepping off the coaches have come from America, Japan, Germany, Australia and France, and the Irish buses bring groups from Dublin and Limerick who have been told they cannot come to Cork without going to Blarney. They walk up through the gardens, reach the foot of the grey tower, and begin the climb, more than a hundred steps up a tight spiral stair, to the battlements at the top.
There they join a shorter queue for the stone itself. When their turn comes, a guide steadies them while they lie back on a sloping section of the parapet, grip a pair of iron rails, and lean backward and down over a gap in the wall. Twenty-six metres below, on the outside of the tower, the grass of the grounds is visible through the opening. They press their lips to a worn block of limestone set into the battlement, the guide helps them up, and they go back down the stairs.
The tourists queue to kiss a stone. Behind it stands the story of Gaelic Munster and how it fell. This book opens with a clear timeline of the castle, from the 1446 keep to the great gardens, then turns to the MacCarthys who built it and ruled the south. You will learn where the word "blarney" came from, why the Battle of Kinsale in 1601 broke the old order, and how the Munster Plantation put Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser on Cork land. Thirteen chapters on the castle and the country it belonged to. Illustrated. Digital download (PDF).
All ten books, including this one, come together in The Cork Stories Collection for €24.99, a saving of almost €35 on buying them one at a time.
What's inside:
Prologue: The Queue
1. The Castle in Brief
2. The MacCarthys and Gaelic Munster
3. The Wider Lords of Munster
4. Building and Defending the Castle
5. A Country of Towers
6. The Bards and the Friars
7. The Stone and the Word
8. The Lords and the Crown
9. Kinsale, 1601
10. The Plantation, Raleigh and Spenser
11. The Long Defeat
12. The Wild Geese and After
13. The Tourist Castle
Epilogue: Back at the Bottom of the Stairs
63 pages, illustrated.
From the opening pages:
On any morning from April to October a queue forms outside the gates of Blarney Castle, eight kilometres northwest of Cork city, and it is an international queue. The visitors stepping off the coaches have come from America, Japan, Germany, Australia and France, and the Irish buses bring groups from Dublin and Limerick who have been told they cannot come to Cork without going to Blarney. They walk up through the gardens, reach the foot of the grey tower, and begin the climb, more than a hundred steps up a tight spiral stair, to the battlements at the top.
There they join a shorter queue for the stone itself. When their turn comes, a guide steadies them while they lie back on a sloping section of the parapet, grip a pair of iron rails, and lean backward and down over a gap in the wall. Twenty-six metres below, on the outside of the tower, the grass of the grounds is visible through the opening. They press their lips to a worn block of limestone set into the battlement, the guide helps them up, and they go back down the stairs.
