Glendalough - Glen of Two Lakes

So we went to Glendalough yesterday. It was AMAZING. Glendalough (Glen-da-Lock) literally means Glen of Two Lakes of Valley of Two Lakes so this valley has two lakes, the Upper and Lower Lake. If one has to put a place down on their Bucket List, visiting Glendalough needs to be one of those items.
Glendalough, like I said before, is an old monastery founded by St. Kevin in the 6th Century. Monastery actually means community so basically a monastery was a religious community. And for the longest time the Irish Monasteries were different from those that we think about on the Continent of Europe. First of all, the monks had many different roles throughout their small community that didn't always include 24/7 fasting and praying. Majority were laymen, cultivating the fields and such for their food source, some were scribes, cooks, millers, bakers, gardeners, and porters, along with many other occupations. They were overseen by Abbots or Abbesses oversaw the nuns. And these small communities weren't just for monks and nuns. For a long time these monasteries including the families of the monks and nuns because the Irish didn't think that to become a monk or nun they had to sustain from marriage. Of course there were a few who did sustain from marriage, but that whole "Thou Shalt Not Marry if You Want To Become a Nun or Monk" wasn't really introduced until the 12th century.

Glendalough, like all monasteries, was a HUGE center of everything. Because there were little kingdoms of petty Irish kings, monasteries became the hub of all business and really the first cities and towns of Ireland. Before that everyone was just spread about. One poem describes this perfectly:

Ailill the king is vanished
Vanished Croghan's fort
Kings to Clonmacnoise now
Come to pay their court

Navan town is shattered
Ruins everywhere
Glendalough remains
Half a world is there.

I think that's a really cool poem.
While at Glendalough we saw was it called the Sanctuary Stone. Now this stone was erected before even the stone archways that served as the gates was made. It has a stone cross etched into it and it symbolized to anyone passing through that they were now in safe territory. The two archways that serve as the entrance to Glendalough are the oldest remaining archways in all of the Celtic nations which include Scotland and Wales.

At Glendalough there is an Irish Round Tower. The whole reason why it is called the Irish Round Tower is because the Irish believe that they invented the Round Tower and that saints from Ireland who traveled to Scotland and Wales brought the idea with them and as our tour guide said "Who is to say the Irish didn't invent the Round Towers?" Many believe that the Towers were made to act as a signal to those traveling to monasteries to show them which direction to take and where the monastery was.
The graveyard at Glendalough is really cool since it's one of - if not the only - graveyard in Ireland to have both Catholics and Protestants buried in it. It was all because when the English took over they put Protestants in it and when the Catholics finally were able to worship they buried their people in the graveyard. So to this day no one has ever done an excavation at Glendalough because of the fact that so many people were buried there in the past few decades they don't want to upset any families who still come and visit the gravesides.

After Glendalough we went and had lunch on the shore of the Upper Lake and then we split into groups. Some staid behind to do short hikes around the lake while I and a slightly larger group took a three hour hike up around the Upper Lake. It was a hard hike but in the end it was absolutely stunning. We were high into the Wicklow Mountains and we could see for miles - we could even see the ocean when we were at the top of where we were. It really was amazing. The only sad thing was when one of our directors, Kyle, told us about how back in 2002 one of the freshmen in the Freshmen Irish Studies Program died while hiking the same hike because she and two other friends went off the path and she fell about 60 feet after not clearing a jump she was trying to make. Yeah, that was really sad.

After the hike we treated ourselves to ice cream. I think we deserved it. My legs today are hurting slightly but not so much now that the day has gotten on. Tomorrow we're going to go see the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin and I can't wait to see that. We're also going to see the college's library which is called the Long Room and Vance Maloney said that one person he knew wept upon seeing the library for the first time. Does that mean I might start weeping? There's that possibility.