roscommon

Date traveled: November 1, 2017

I wonder what it’s like to live in a small town known for its castle from almost a millennium ago.

This castle isn’t even the only one in Roscommon – it’s just the most famous one. It’s not really that famous – I don’t know that anyone outside of the area thinks much about it. It’s next to a really big green space, the old castle grounds, that is a park that people walk around in the middle of the day with strollers. The castle itself serves as a jungle gym. 

I don’t remember if we were purposely travelling to this castle, or if we saw a road sign that had a castle icon and we figured it’d be a good place to stop. They were pretty common in the more rural parts of the country. I climbed up to a second story window area of the castle, which was harder than I expected because the rocks were hard to grip, pondering my existence and lack of sleep.

When I wandered around the castle ruins, I thought about what it would’ve been like to be there hundreds of years ago when it was functional. Perhaps a town would all be inside, fortified from anyone passing by, or perhaps it would only be the elites inside the walls and their servants. I have so little knowledge of the social lives of people who lived in castle times. I wonder how much they thought about what the space would be like hundreds of years later.

Aside from how cool they look, I like the idea of a functional castle that houses a community. It’s like a commune, with shared spaces and a micro-economy. Apartment buildings are a somewhat modern version of this, but with the lack of common areas; with the boxed-off design of most of them, the interactive elements of somewhat communal living are lost. I’m not suggesting that it’d be better if people didn’t have private spaces – I would never want to live somewhere without the ability to have my own personal rooms and lock my doors – but I think architectural design, and urban planning, suffers from erring on the side of over-privatization, over-assumption of people preferring to commute endlessly to places and rarely be fully present anywhere.

I think this kind of interior design is especially important in communities with severe weather, which will continue to be more of a thing as the climate bi-polars. In the winter in cold places, we spend so much more time indoors. With such separation from other humans, we retreat into our own private spaces, interacting mostly via screens.

When driving from Galway on the western coast of the island, we literally stopped to see a castle/graveyard on the side of the road, then continued on to Roscommon to see the larger castle. The graveyard castle felt like a small maze. I couldn’t imagine community there the same way as I did at Roscommon. It felt more like a relic.

The best part of Ireland was the meanders through small town highways, passing by sheep and narrow roads that were uncomfortable to drive on. The rolling landscape, the ruins of a history I could fill in my mind, was so much more enjoyable than the crowds in Dublin. I’m not sure what people living in the rural parts of the country feel like or how hard their lives are, but that was the most unique part for me of passing through slowly.

Most places I go, I’d like to spend more time, though here I don’t know what more I would do. I guess just drive. More likely, my next visit to the general area will be to Scotland instead. There I’ll compare the differences in the landscapes, the culture, and the way everything feels, with the added bonus of visiting the distilleries and warming my belly with all the scotch.