Why not, I'm sure you'll be very welcome.

I can offer lessons via small tests to help you prepare for a trip there one day. For example, can you translate the following Irish word into English?

Bigorrah!

Sounds amazing. I am glad to be part of this club.

Imagine a honeymoon in Ireland

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Married Dean Winchester 3/18/13 (est. 2005)

Ah yes but first you'll have to catch a husband, with a fairy trap. There are stone circles, called dolmen which probably came from pre-Christian ie celtic times, as a Wicca/ pagan tomb maybe. They are a bit like mini Stone Henge, only with a one or two stone slabs for a roof. Perhaps they could also tell the time eg as sun clocks or function as shelters being large enough to stand in. There's one or two I've visited. As children we climbed on, through and around them.

But seriously, if the sun were shining, cycling through those narrow long lanes, hedged in by great beech trees, perhaps even a few wild strawberries or raspberries in the ditch, and the sun on the barley in the fields, its elysian. Its nice too lying out on the hay when it dries in the fields, with a frisky sheep dog wriggling beside you, looking to explore the hedges. Ah memories from youth, riding horses bare back in the long grassy fields.

What's the country side like in Egypt?

*twitches* Considering Wicca has only been around since the 1950s (or at a stretch a few decades before but it can't be proven) I highly doubt it.

Oh and a dolmen isn't a stone circle.


Anyway, I love Ireland. I need to go back there. And not just to sit in a pub in Temple Bar watching Ireland vs Wales in the 6 nations.

Oh well.. One day when I win at the lottery or a scratch cards or in the premium bonds I shall buy a campervan and go all over the British Isles and the places I want to go. Most of them are prehistoric monuments, not that I have an obsession with prehistory. No precious.

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All by Bellatrix
Married Nymphadora Tonks 29/6/13

An Egyptian husband of the same sort of madness as I am or better Irish one .

AWWWW Sounds amazing. I am into prr-Christian Celtic time (they are magical and The Celtic people introduced soap to the whole British Isles )


The country side is like a song waiting to be sang, so peaceful, green and the best times I spent there .

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Married Dean Winchester 3/18/13 (est. 2005)

*twitches* Considering Wicca has only been around since the 1950s (or at a stretch a few decades before but it can't be proven) I highly doubt it.

Oh and a dolmen isn't a stone circle.

I stand corrected. What is a dolmen then? The one's I've been to in Carlow are arranged in a roughly ring shape, c3m diameter, maybe 5 foot tall. I read they were tombs, but why that construction? The layout superficially at least looks like it could have been arranged for astrological alignment, but I wouldn't know how to assess that properly. I always thought, but never looked into it, that Wicca was just a rebranding of witchcraft which may/ may not have been a rebranding of pagan herb pharmacological practise by christianity, which would mean that the purpose of arranging the stones would pre-date Christianity. But these views I'll admit are the result of putting 2+2 together and coming out without something that only might approximate 4.

Anyway, I love Ireland. I need to go back there. And not just to sit in a pub in Temple Bar watching Ireland vs Wales in the 6 nations.

I agree. Many cities in Europe, Dublin included tend to loose their national identity with real wood effect veneers and genuine turf-like fires. One of the few I've been to which hasn't to my mind at least is Seville. Temple Bar reminds me of that Guinness ad where two Irish potatoes sitting in quiet conversation at the bar, notice an American potato look in, one of quiet potatoes whispers: Tourists! And of a sudden de diddle de dee music starts up and all the local potatoes start having "the craic" to be sure to be sure. Now you don't get that down in the Carlow, unless its as a piss take of themselves.

The country side is like a song waiting to be sang, so peaceful, green and the best times I spent there .[/quote]

That's a nice turn of phrase. Like a bird tweeting or the cos lying down in the field before midday rain.

Cornwall and maybe other parts of SW England I think has some Celtic connection too. The people down there are to me, different to other parts. I find them nice and like that even the local council in towns gets small things down with natural materials like willow rather than some metal or plastic monstrosity. There's a polyhedral tunnel of willow arches in a park in Taunton (not Cornwall I know) which is superb even in Winter. There a nice poem about a river called Dart by Alice Oswald. It has a great rhythm and soothing descriptiveness. The flows from Dartmoor to Dartmouth in Devon I think.

If you like things pre-Christian, there's slightly silly, slightly scary film called the *Wicker Man (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/). It has great music of a style I only heard once before in a pub in Bath, where 3 Irish musicians came in to practise. They had a flute, a harp and female vocalist. The sound was like something very old, but resonant, beautiful, a bit like the songs on Lord of the Rings funnily enough. Apart from the music of the Wickerman, in my travels around Ireland, I' ve never found anything like it. It would be great music for a wedding reception.


*I stand to be chastised for allusion to something which may in fact be more modern than I realised. But what hell, I liked the film, the 1973 version.

Dolmens are tombs. Usually three or more upright stones with a capstone balanced on top of them. Most date from the early Neolithic period: 4000BC - 3000BC.
We really don't know that much about them though.

Pentre Ifan is the one I know best. This is a photo I took of it: http://oi49.tinypic.com/2cenvn.jpg

This: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... nRecon.jpg is a possible reconstruction of it when it was a tomb. So the stones are the entrance, if that makes sense?




Righto.... Mini history and terminology lesson here...

Wicca is a contemporary paganism religion. Contemporary paganism is also referred to as neo-paganism to separate its meaning from pre-Christianity religious practises.
Wicca does not equal witchcraft. This gets quite confusing because a lot of the pop-wicca authors will use wiccan and witch interchangeably which is just wrong.
Anyway, Wicca is a religion. It can only be dated back to the 20th century, although its practises were probably influences from things like the Free Masons which do date back a bit further. Any claims that it is based on practises older than that are completely unsustainable.
Basically, in the 1950s all the witchcraft laws in the UK were repelled so a man called Gerald Gardner published a book called Witchcraft Today. It wasn't until a few decades later that the religious practises he described were finally labelled as "Wicca". But by then there were already different traditions being practised.
Witchcraft is a practise. Most Wiccans do practise witchcraft but a few might not. Conversely, there are a lot of witches out there who are not wiccan. There are even atheist witches.
Wicca is probably best to class as religious witchcraft. Although it's not the only form of religious witchcraft out there, it's the most well-known. (Which makes finding books a serious pain. So many will just say witchcraft and then when I finally get them and start reading them, they're all about wicca, the author just chose to use the word witch instead. )

As for the "witches" killed during the Middle Ages, there's no evidence of what those people practised (if indeed they did practise anything) so again, no claim can be made that modern witchcraft has any link. OK, people will try to claim it but there's no proof.

For the prehistoric peoples of the British Isles, we don't have a clue what they believed. Well, we do know that their beliefs changed but British (and by that I mean the British Isles) prehistory covers thousands of years. The monuments you see are built by different peoples at different times in prehistory. Take Pentre Ifan, that's been dated from around 3500BC. But on top of the mountain that you can see in the background through the stones in that photo, there is a very complex hillfort which is Iron Age and is from the first millennium BC. (Although there is some evidence of earlier Bronze Age activities up there. )


Anyway, I don't really know what I'm writing anymore. If you are interested in the history of Wicca I would really recommend The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Professor Ronald Hutton.

Just so nobody worries, that book is not a "how to" book or anything like that. It's a book written by one of the history professors at Bristol University and it's a purely academic work.

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All by Bellatrix
Married Nymphadora Tonks 29/6/13

Ah, thank goodness for my heavy use of cond itional verbs!

The photo's a good one. Impressive structure. I must look more closely at the dolmen near my aunty's house next time I'm over in Ireland. Funny you don't realise how significant they are when you're clambering over them as a child. Ooops. I think this is the one, on a SE bearing wrt to Acaun bridge, over the R Derren in Carlow.

http://visionsofthepastblog.wordpress.c ... co-carlow/

But to my mind even now it looks more circular in layout than others.

The structure hyperlink is very interesting. Looks a bit like it shares elements with both Anglo Saxon burial mounds and Egyptian tombs.

Well... I am not sure how many people are still active in this club but I am predominately of Irish descent and I LOVE Ireland! Everything I know about it.

Thought I would stop in and say so if nothing else!

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