A little perspective please

The thing about being an Australian in Ireland is that it throws your country's heritage into rather harsh perspective - and by heritage, I should clarify that I'm talking about my personal heritage, not that of the country as a whole; I know the land was around and inhabited long before my ancestors even thought of setting foot there, but it's harder to grasp that heritage than it is for me to keep track of my own. To all intents and purposes, Australia as a country as has been around for little - very little - over a century. Ireland, on the other hand, had already been conquered and freed more times than I care to think about before the English knew the great south land existed.

A short walk from Killarney, where I'm based at the moment, are places that it's hard to believe, from my limited perspective, how old they are, buildings of so little note that often they have been left to moulder in some farmer's paddock with the government paying little of no attention to them - my theory is because there are so many. The fields are littered with ruins and must make life rather hard for the farmers. As near as I can tell, there are no laws or obligations on the farmers to keep them up. The only thing that stops some of them from being destroyed entirely is the combination expense it wuld occassion to move the pile of rubble and the superstitions that have arisen over the years that some of these piles are relics of the time when the faerie walked the irish soil.

Other times, the government has their attention called to a ruin and does it up in specatcular style. Ross Castle, for example, was bought by a consortium of americans who intended to turn it into a holiday resort. One of them had an attack of conscience, however, and somehow managed to get the irish government to pay for the repairs before he handed the ownership of the castle - and the 16,000 acres of land attached to it - back to the irish people. Now it forms one of the centrepieces of Killarney National Park. Tourists can now visit the 15th Century tower house and see what life would have been like for the chieftain and his family, as well as their servants - people who slept 15 to a room that these days would be comdemned as too poky, and turned into a study.

The information the guides can offer also makes you think. Life expectancy back in the 15th and 16th centuries for the Irish was not great. Estimates put it at 27-35. I scape into that age bracket now. Think of what those people would have lived through in that time, and again that perspective I was talking about before changes. Harsh life, wars, raids, famine, disease, child rearing...all within the time it wook me to grow up, get an education and barely get started on my life. Having seen the way they lived, however - and I'm talking about the priveleged upper classes here, as well - it makes you wonder what we're waiting for half the time. That and the knowledge that if I'd been born 500 years earlier, I'd probably be a grandmother! With the amount that they crammed into such a short time frame, the miracle is that they lived that long in the first place and didn't just drop dead of exhaustion, not to mention cold, given that they still hadnt discovered windows. Makes you kind of glad to be a twenty frist century kind of girl, really.