Bunratty Folk Castle

Saturday, August 9. We left our Killarney hotel, stopped at the Bunratty Castle and Folk Park (thanks to Mike & Marie Underwood and Sigrid Soini!), and ended the day at our hotel in Galway. Full disclosure: This was the first and perhaps only stop on our tour that disappointed us. 

Things started out promising enough. The castle looks great from the outside. 

The inside, though, has some problems. The current structure is nearly 600 years old, originally built by the MacNamara family. It was intended as a lavish home, one capable of hosting a few hundred people at a time, but never designed to host a few thousand tourists a day. Here are a few of the larger halls and smaller private quarters. 

You can climb all the way up to the roof and the turrets. 

And that is a LONG way up there. 

But eventually you have to go down, and that means going down stairs like this. 

Wait, let's get some people on those stairs so you can see how small and tight they are. 

Now imagine that there are a dozen people at the top of the turret trying to get down, and a dozen more trying to get up, and nobody anywhere directing traffic. Oh, and the stairs don't go straight from the main floor to the top. There are other floors on the way where people are constantly getting off and on, and going up and down. Eventually people just start squeezing past each other to get where they need to be. It was all chaotic and more than a little scary. There's not much in the castle that can burn, but if a fire ever broke out in that place it would take an hour to get everyone out. We didn't even tour the whole castle, at some point we decided that we were done and wanted out. 

The castle is surrounded by a recreation of a medieval village. 

And they have livestock.

Fun with depth of focus! I didn't even mean for this to happen.

Quick! Everyone make a Shrek joke!

They also have a nice garden.

There was a wedding there that day, and this sweet, sweet ride was waiting to take the happy couple away. 

After lunch (thanks to Todd, Cate, & Jenny Reynolds) it was on to our Galway hotel (thanks to Bill Barnwell and Ben & Robin Lesh!) We were tired that night, so dinner was a simple affair at the hotel restaurant (thanks to Rodney Rogers!) It's a good thing we got our rest, we had quite an adventure the next day.