The Tangible Past: My Adventures Abroad Part 1

I have always had a passion for history. Perhaps it is because I have hardly any personal, tangible history of my own.  I always drag my family from ancient pillar to medieval post whenever we go overseas, visiting old buildings and new museums alike.

During my travels in Ireland I took special care to learn the history of the buildings that I passed by every day. They are tangible connections to the past and I thought I’d tell you some of the things I discovered.

I often chose to take the “longer” road home from college, past fields and hedges, gentle rambling blackberry vines, mooing cows and rambunctious ponies. If it sounds idyllic, its because it was, especially in my eyes. To anyone else in Ireland, it was just another road down another lane. I loved taking this route at the end of the school week, when classes were over and I could walk at my leisure, breathe in the cool air, and hum a tune without looking crazy. Plus, it was a downhill walk. Hah.

Towards the end of Clash Road I would pass a field known as “God’s Acre”. It would be usually empty, but I would also see people stop there now and again with flowers. Out of respect  I did not take any pictures. It always made me feel very sober thinking about the hundreds of men, women and children buried there during the Great Famine.

Google Streetview… as you can see it’s a very simple field.

This is a large gravesite just outside the town, where hundreds of the dead from Tralee’s Workhouse would have been buried in unmarked graves during the Famine and in later years. –  Site

Actually, I had passed by the Tralee Workhouse many times. As you can see below, it’s near the county hospital and St. Catherine’s, which I usually pass on the way to Manor West, where the largest Tesco in Tralee is. There was a picket-line strike going on at that Tesco and our Student’s Union was supporting it, so I didn’t visit it for quite a long chunk of time during the Spring Semester.

 

I passed this church many, many times. Didn’t know it was attached to the Workhouse.

 

I did not use this map to find Tesco. The one and only McDonald’s in town is also located on this map.

On one of my first excursions, I went with my new friend Rachel to talk the Tralee canal, from which I broadcasted live to Facebook. If you follow the canal for about thirty minutes, you’d arrive at Blennerville mill. I never made it to Blennerville mill by foot but at a very late-night musical after-party the night “daylight savings” ended, a family from Tarbert told me about the hundreds of people who left Ireland for America from Blennerville, especially during the famine.

 

 

The port at Blennerville was used through most of the 19th century as a gateway from Kerry to North America by emigrants wishing to cross the Atlantic Ocean. – Wikipedia

A lot of the history I learned in Ireland was “oral history”, from the very people whose ancestors had lived through it.

The other “mall” in town, “The Square”, where the ‘smaller Tesco” is, sits upon the site of an medieval monastery. Here are aerial photos of Tralee taken during the 1950s. The monastery would have been under the buildings on the bottom left.

The blank “square” in the centre “The Square”. I shopped, ate pizza, and topped up  my Sim card in the surrounding shops. I also passed by one eerie night back from the theatre where all the shop alarms started blaring for no reason.

The tall church, St’ John’s Church of Ireland, is where I occasionally went for Morning Prayer. There isn’t a Methodist church in town as it was sold and turned into a liquor store.  I went down this road very often as it’s the quickest way to the town centre.

Above: See that tall building on the left? That’s Kelliher’s Mill, built between 1885 to 1890. This photo is from the 1930s.

Detached seven-bay five-storey warehouse, built 1887, with four-storey extension to rear and two-storey extension to right hand side. Pitched with purple slate roof and cast-iron rainwater goods with limestone ashlar bellcote to gable. Single-pitched profiled metal roof cladding to extensions. Snecked sandstone walls with ashlar limestone quoins and red brick parapet. Profiled metal cladding to upper part of rear extension and cement rendered to side extension. Fixed metal windows in segmental-arched opening with red brick reveals and surrounds and limestone sills. Circular windows to gables and boarded windows to ground floor. Galvanised double leaf top hung sliding doors to ground floor arch. Double leaf galvanised doors to side extension. Metal silos to rear. – Buildings of Ireland

Below: The very same mill from my bedroom window.

 

Some of my FB friends remarked that it looked haunted. I wonder what kind of mill it was, and what the place would have looked like during the 1880s.

I would sit at this window nearly every day. Schoolchildren would wave to me from their bus windows while I ate my over-elaborate meals and worked on assignments.

I actually lost weight.

My absolute favourite weekends were spent with family in my home-away-from-home in Country Cork. Here’s a picture of the nearby town in the 1950s. Now, the pier is full of boats, and down the road, next to the bridge, is a truck selling the loveliest, freshest fish and chips I have ever had. The patch of green is the town park, I think.

It was sitting in the restaurant and looking out at this pier that I saw snow fall for the first time in my life, in January of this year. It was in these waters that Queen Elizabeth the First’s navy fought against the 2nd Spanish Armada, sent by Philip II to defend Irish sovereignty.

The home that I live in in Malaysia is less than 30 years old. It probably was a rubber plantation before, and a rainforest before that. There aren’t any aerial photographs or history records to look into, and if there were, I’d be very happy to look them up.

How do we learn history? We can learn about wars and important dates from books, but we can also learn about the past through places we visit and the people we meet.