Walk

After a lot of rain overnight the morning looked promising, and the weather got better and brighter as the day progressed. Today was Mrs. Map's day off and we spent most of the day together on our own. A grand day indeed!

In the evening, after feeding all the Maplets, helping with homework, chatting and sharing everybody's news, it seemed a sin to loll on the couch so Mr. & Mrs. Map put on the trackies & tackies and went for an evening walk. Plassey (our walking route for this evening) is an area full of wonderful walks, it's also where the University of Limerick is situated. It's always busy with strollers, runners, fisherman (it's by the river) and obviously lots of students.

One of the first things we passed on our walk was the ruins of Plassey Castle (see pic below). It has very vivid memories for me. As a young teenager I, along with friends would often take this walk by the river, sometimes spending the whole day, during the school summer holidays. (This was before the college gained university status, and hadn't even begun to expand to take up as much space as it does now.) It was our 'Riveria'! Youngfellas jumpin' in the river, auldfellas fishin', wonderful.

That was 35 years ago. It's only recently I've started coming back to the area, and only this week that I started using the river walks again. 35 years ago three friends of mine took shelter from a sudden thunder storm in the castle ruins. A bolt of lightning struck the castle and Killian was killed instantly. The other two lads survived. They were all, like me, 15 at the time. I recently became friendly with Killian's uncle who told me his parents never recovered from their loss.

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In the following pics the large buildings are 'on-campus' student accommodation, the smaller ones are fishermen's huts.