Today Shannon decided to stay at the cottage (she went for walks, went to the friary nearby, watched TV and wrote letters). Tom, Jess and I drove up to Northern Ireland, passing through Newry. Newry still has the checkpoint for crossing the border, but these days you just drive around it. It's still rather intimidating, with all the barbed wire, the communications network, and the heavily defended police stations. We had forgotten that, essentially, we were goi...

We slept in this morning and took it easy today. We drove up to Longford, where my Thomas Denning was born in 1790. We spoke to a little man in the genealogy office and we're to ring him on Monday to see if it's worth them doing a search. We then headed down to Athlone and then down to Shannon Harbour, Shannon Bridge and the Shannon River. We had lunch by the river at the bridge. We travelled on to Clonmacnoise - the best preserved monastic site in Ireland - fo...

We finally drove onto the ferry at about 3.30am. We left Holyhead harbour at 4am. On the ferry we did a bit of duty free shopping, then we found a comfy spot (after having sandwiches and drinks) and dozed. We arrived in Dublin at about 7am and decided not to stay so we drove out to Newgrange. Newgrange is a tomb constructed by neolithic farmers, over 5,000 years ago. The tomb (or passage grave) is 500 years older than the pyramids, and it was made so that at s...

After breakfast at the Little Chef (or Little Chief as Jess calls it) we headed to Whitby. We saw the bridge at the mouth of the inner harbour open to let a trawler through, then we drove up to the Abbey on the south cliff and watched a ship come in to the harbour through the narrow channel. We drove back over to the north cliff and saw the statue of Captain Cook and some whale bones. The Captain Cook museum was closed. We had lunch at Cook's Galley - a little ca...

We packed this morning, and were out of Monachyle Mhor by 8.15am (after paying 16 pounds for a week's electricity!!) We drove down to England and over to the coast. Luckily the tide was out and Holy Island was accessible across the causeway (10.30am - 5pm). We drove over to Lindisfarne Castle, which wasn't open, but we were able to walk all around it. After that we went to Lindisfarne Priory - it was really large in its day. All very impressive. The causeway get...