Ireland day 1143. Thursday 14 November 2024- UK Guests Day 5

Today’s summary	We, along with our two friends, took the train into Dublin this morning and walked from Jervis up to the museum at 14 Henrietta Street. The museum compares the original Georgian regency life in this house with tenement life in the same building a century later. Fascinating. A quiet night in the flat afterwards, with linguine kindly prepared for us by our guests, followed by a bit of TV.
Today’s weather	Overcast with heavy drizzle. Almost no wind. Appx 13c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The orange mark shows where we walked) (No GPX today)

Commentary

In the first few weeks of our life in Ireland, three years ago, we had visited the “museum” house at 14 Henrietta Street, Dublin.

This “museum” explores the contrast between the use of the house in its original form as an elegant Georgian town-house occupied by a single well-to-do family in the mid eighteenth century, with its subsequent use a hundred years later as a tenement housing 100 people in 17 separate families. We had very much enjoyed our visit at the time, and had always wanted to go back at some point. Having visitors with an interest in matters historic provided the ideal opportunity to pay a return visit.

So after a relatively relaxed breakfast, we got up and while Val went for a run, the rest of us pulled ourselves together and got ready for a day out. Eventually we were all, respectively, breakfasted, exercised and showered, so we pottered off the station and caught a train into town at about 11:45am.

We were at Henrietta Street in plenty of time for our tour at 1pm, so passed a few minutes taking photos and having a good look round the other townhouses in the street (some of which are still privately owned and occupied). The tour was expertly led by our guide Gillian, who seemed to have something of a theatrical air about her. She certainly brought the house and its occupants over three centuries to life, and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit.

Once we had finished, we were ready for a late lunch. So we walked down to the nearby “Mish Mash art café” (very “on trend”!) to enjoy a good coffee and toasted sandwich before meandering slowly across Dublin to Connolly and catching a train back to Malahide.

Once back at the ranch, we did a little shopping, had a cup of tea, then our guests elected to cook dinner for us. So we had an excellent quick dinner of linguine followed by fruit and ice cream, which was all the more enjoyable for not having had to make it.

We rounded off the evening with a couple of YouTube videos and eventually retired to bed at about 11:30.

Another excellent day, and a good occasion for remembering why having visitors can be such a brilliant catalyst for galvanising you into doing the things you had been meaning to do for ages, but which you’d been repeatedly putting off because there was always something more pressing to attend to first.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Deliciously unhealthy sounding refreshments on sale at Connolly Station	See if you can decipher the graffiti scrawled on the walls on the communal staircase in the tenement block

Inside a reproduction of one of the last occupied tenement flats in 14 Henrietta Street	We had a quick look in the O’Connell Street GPO on the way back. We didn’t have time to look round the exhibition to the 1916 uprising, but the sales floor itself is impressive and definitely worth a visit



Full frontage of the townhouse at no. 14 Henrietta Street