A Swift tour of the Liberties
The Liberties, Dublin
After our jaunt along the coast, we are now back in the inner city. In the Liberties, to be exact, the heart of dear old Dublin. With emphasis on the old. At Wood Quay we are literally standing above the site of an important Viking settlement. Her Ladyship still remembers the huge controversy over the building of the Dublin City Council offices on this ancient site back in the late 1970s. I sincerely hope that city planners have come to their senses since those days!
In my humble opinion, stunning Christ Church Cathedral, dating from 1028, is a lot easier on this bird’s eye than that concrete …. how to put it politely? … eyesore next door. The cathedral must surely be one of Dublin’s finest buildings. Our tour took us up to the belfry where the Oldies were allowed to ring a couple of the famous bells. What a din! Though it was highly amusing to see Her Ladyship shooting upwards as she hung on to the bell rope for dear life. I think she, for one, soon realised that there’s a lot more to bell ringing than meets the eye.
After our descent, we crept into the crypt and met this creepy pair, fondly known as Tom and Jerry. Discovered in the 1850s, it appears that the cat was chasing the rat when they both got stuck inside an organ pipe, where their bodies eventually mummified. They have been stuck together ever since. Talk about coming to a sticky end!
We also learned that the preserved heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, the patron saint of Dublin, which had been in Christ Church Cathedral for over 800 years was stolen in 2012. I’ve heard of stealing someone’s heart, but this is ridiculous! But there’s a bizarre twist to this bizarre tale: a little bird told me that the Gardaí (Irish police) have just recovered the precious relic and returned it to the cathedral, to the delight of Dubliners everywhere.
This cheery mural depicts the Christ Church choir singing at world premiere of Handel’s Messiah in Dublin in 1742. Handel is the cool chap in the funky wig. The Christ Church Choir School was apparently founded back in 1493. Over 500 years ago! Gosh. With so many years of practice, no wonder they are so good.
I was so excited to see plaques depicting scenes from ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ on a terrace of houses across the road from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. My hero and inspiration, Jonathan Swift, was Dean of the cathedral from 1713 to 1745. The famous Irish author and cleric certainly features prominently in this neighbourhood.
Just down the road from St. Patrick’s, we followed in the footsteps of some other famous Irish authors when we paid a visit to Marsh’s Library. With a catalogue of over 25,000 rare books, this was the first public library in Ireland when it opened in 1707, and visitors included James Joyce and Bram Stoker. The library records suggest that Bram Stoker was doing research for his most famous work, ‘Dracula’, in the Old Reading Room, as he was listed as having consulted, for example, a map of Transylvania (a part of Europe which he never actually visited). There was no such thing as Google Maps in those days, but it seems that even back then a record was kept of your searches!
When we were in Portugal, I heard that one of the main threats to the books in Coimbra University Library is paper-eating insects (kept at bay by a colony of bats that live in the building). Here in Marsh’s, the main danger to the books appears to be man. According to the current exhibition, ‘Hunting Stolen Books’, over 1,100 books were stolen from 1707 to 1840. Book theft became such a problem that reading ‘cages’ were installed into which readers were locked during their visit. When finished reading, they had to ring a bell in order to be released. I certainly wouldn’t fancy being caged like that, although my owners both said that they’d have no problem being locked in this beautiful library with all those wonderful volumes.
Some of the precious books even came under fire during the Easter Rising in 1916. In the course of the fighting, several stray bullets passed through or became imbedded in a number of volumes and their ‘wounds’ are still visible today.
I was so looking forward to looking into more traces of Swift in his home territory. However, as we were just a stone’s throw from St. James’s Gate, His Lordship was never going to pass up the opportunity to have a pint of Guinness practically at the source. The Wingless Wonders soon settled themselves in one of the many typical old Liberties pubs and Yours Truly had to endure the horse racing on the telly while Himself waited patiently for his pint to settle.
To quote James Joyce in ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, it appears that when I’m out with the Oldies, I am as stuck to them “… as that cat to that mouse in that tube of that Christchurch organ…”
