Leftover Images from Ireland: Part Twelve

 Today I have more images from St. Kevin's Monastic Settlement and the Avoca Weaving Mills.  I'll start with St. Kevin's at Glendalough.  You can read more about it by clicking on the link I've provided.  It was a dark and rainy day, but it seemed appropriate given the setting.  There are only a few buildings remaining of the original settlement and many gravesites.

Some of the headstones were ancient while some of them were quite recent . . . within the last ten years.

Such old headstones are a marvel to me.  This one is so old that all of the carving has worn off of it, and yet, someone is buried here.  Someone who lived long ago.  Someone who lived a humble and hard life.  Someone who no doubt died young by today's standards.  Do you suppose they had any idea while they lay dying that hundreds of years hence, a tourist would wander through and take a picture of their final resting place?  

There were many family plots.

Some graves were within the ruins of buildings.

This sign gives you some idea about what the function of the round towers were, and there were plenty of round tower ruins all over Ireland.  This was one of the more intact of these structures that we saw.  I'm hoping you'll be able to read the sign.  Click on the image to make it larger if you need to.

The rest of the images are from the Avoca Weaving Mills, which were founded in 1723 and have operated continuously since that time.

Here is the little village of Avoca.  We turned to the left and drove through the little village and then on to the mills.  There were raindrops on the window of the bus, which explains the smudges in the center of this image.

  

This woman took us on a tour of the mills and explained things to us.  I couldn't get over the colors of the fibers, yarns, and threads.

These next two signs explain the looms that follow.

Here, a pattern is laid out for cutting.

Most of the spools were stored in large bins, but for some reason, these were stored in drawers in the room where garments were made

along with these buttons.

I could have spent a fortune in the shop.  There were so many beautiful things.

Who wouldn't want to wear these on a rainy day?

Or these?

Don't these just make you want to soak in a hot tub?  Carrot soap.  Who would have thought?

And strawberry soap.  

So that's all I have for today.  Tomorrow I'll show you some of the things I didn't want to see in Ireland, and within the next day or two, I'll show you the doors of Ireland.

T