War of the roses

Remember the movie "War of the Roses"? Well, one Irish family lived out a version of that story. Imagine, if you can, one half of a house decorated in one style, and the other half decorated in a completely different style.

We'll examine that story in a bit.

We left Dublin and headed for Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland consists of six of the nine counties that make up the region of Ulster. Northern Ireland is predominantly Protestant and is under British rule. Dublin is part of the Republic of Ireland, which is mostly Catholic and exercises self rule. 

You won't know you've passed from one to other any more than you'd notice driving from Texas to Oklahoma on a back road. There's no border crossing, no immigration to pass through. But the signs would give it away. 

In the Republic all the road signs are bilingual and the distances and speeds are metric. In Northern Ireland, they dispense with the bilingual signs and the distances and speeds are in miles. In contrast to the Texas-Oklahoma idea, you will also switch currencies. The Republic uses the euro, while Northern Ireland uses pounds sterling. 

Speaking of money, as best as I could tell, both systems dispense with small bills. The smallest denomination note I saw was a fiver. One and two euro and pound coins are dispensed in change. Can you imagine doing away with the dollar bill and using one and two dollar coins as freely as you would any other coin? Nah, me neither, given our history.

Also I noticed that shopkeepers seemed really pleased when I would pay with the coinage already figured out instead of standing with a handful of change and asking them what they needed like many other tourists did. The system's really not that hard if you just pay a little bit of attention.

Our first stop of the day will be in Downpatrick. Along the way we'll learn a bit of Irish history, which I won't go into. Suffice to say that national and religious identity shaped the history and created the conflicts that produced a split nation, a division not likely to end any time soon. Google it sometime. It's very interesting.

We'd been given a mini-lesson in Irish (Irish Gaelic or Erse). "Dun" means fort, fortress, stronghold. "Bally" means place of, town of. "Kill" means church. "Glen" means valley, not really new info for most of us. And "Lough" means lake, pronounced like "loch" with the guttural ch that sounds like you're clearing your throat.

Remember, coming up is the story of the house with a split personality, but first we'll stop in at Downpatrick.

"Down," by the way, derives from "dun," so it means, well, you know what it means now. This settlement goes way back in history, almost as far back as Patrick himself. The earliest reference to a religious identity for the town dates to the mid-700s, with the death of an abbot. A cathedral was built there at the top of one of the hills and is by tradition considered to be the burial spot of the saint himself.

The burial site, maybe, more or less, of St. Patrick.

Of course, you can't prove that, and much prestige attaches to a church or spot that can claim to be the burial spot of a saint, so the area would be invested in having the patron saint buried there. But I could only find two other possibilities, and the evidence apparently isn't any stronger for either of them. 

During our visit to the cathedral a nice woman briefly gives us Patrick's history and reminds us quite firmly that on St. Patrick's day, the Irish do not celebrate with green beer but with devotion. Our guide has already mentioned that Patrick's color is not green but blue and that the association of Patrick with the shamrock as a teaching tool to explain the Trinity came about centuries after his death and is, therefore, probably not reliable.

From the cathedral we drive into town to visit the St. Patrick's center, a quite modern tourist attraction/museum, where we see a short film about Patrick, which is interesting but fails to provide any new information. The museum is quite nice, but we don't have time to hang out and explore because we have to grab lunch and head for the next destination: Castle Ward, the house with the unusual decorating scheme.

As we drive through the gorgeous countryside, an opening in the trees suddenly reveals the site of an 18th century mansion with a beautifully manicured lawn, looking for all the world like something out of a period movie. For "Game of Thrones" fans, some location shooting is done here. The site was the home of the Ward family for 400 years, though it is now cared for and administered by the national trust.

The old castle survives, though we did not see it, but the house, built in the 1760s, is the reason for our visit. Bernard Ward built the house and preferred the Georgian style. His wife, Anne, disliked that style and Bernard. I'm thinking the docents told us it was an arranged marriage. They did not grow to love each other, though they were together long enough to produce eight children. The house is neatly divided in two halves, Bernard's half decorated in Georgian, and Anne's in Gothic.

A corner of the great hall. The plaster hangings in this section

are genuine. The ones on the other side of this wall were produced by
dipping common household objects and a real violin in plaster
and mounting them. The columns are faux marble, but they were supposed
to be. I don't remember what the process was called, but it was popular

in the 18th century.

I'm sorry I don't have pictures of Anne's half. The asked us not to take flash pictures, and Anne's half of the house is dark. I, meanwhile, forgot that my fancy, latest camera takes nice, low-light pictures if you only remember to use the right settings. It may be for the best. I wouldn't want viewers to react like the woman in the Haverty's commercial who has a panic attack when she and her chair are confronted with ugliness.

Construction on the house lasted for years, and the story goes that Anne left when it was finished. One set of construction workers flim-flammed Bernard. Plaster figures adorning the walls and ceilings were popular at the time, and Bernard commissioned workers to decorated the great hall of the house. The work drug on until Bernard issued an ultimatum. He would be leaving for a while and expected the work to be complete. On his return, he found to his satisfaction that his orders had been carried out.

But a modern inspection of the work revealed that the workers took a shortcut and dipped common household items and instruments in plaster and mounted them on the wall. As far as anyone knows, Bernard never discovered the sham.

Next up: Belfast.