Hellfire club!!

So I was at the Hellfire Club yesterday with my friend from college. I'm getting tired of calling her Morticia as she's really very sweet, so let's call her Pollyanna.
We went there by public transport, a long and rather tortuous experience in itself, in and out of a bewildering number of suburbs, and involving hitching a ride for the last bit, but finally we were there, in the foothills of the Dublin/Wicklow mountains. The walk up to Hellfire was short and the view across the city absolutely amazing. The weather was glorious.
The Club itself is really just a ruined house, but it is built from very dark stone, which gives it a very ominous air, and according to my guide, was built over two hundred years ago from stones ransacked from a local megalithic tomb, which would account for any curses or bad luck there might be floating about. Sadly, I didn't see any ghosts or ghouls, but I did some empty cider cans inside which suggested that maybe the young folks of the Dublin mountains have been using it as a hang out joint.
After paying our respects to the club we went for a little walk in the nearby Massey Woods and then made our way slowly and painfully back to the city.
This must be a fantastic place to visit if you have a car and I'm kicking myself for not having organised an international license when I was back home--not that I could afford to rent a car, mind you. Healthier looking people than me were going about on mountain bikes. Maybe in the summer.
Someone told me yesterday that, in Ireland, a good May means a bad summer, and the weather is actually pretty nice right now, so that's bad, right?
[Pause while I go to the kitchen to grab a cold one from the fridge]
I was just talking to Bepe. Fabia has the use of a car every second weekend; it belongs to the family she's au pairing for as they have two cars and take one to their country house in Courtown every second weekend. He says she'd love to take me to the Dublin mountains. So if I want to get there easily, I'll have to befriend that skinny bee-atch. Well, it's beautiful up there, so it might even be worth it!

0 comments:

Post a Comment