Turlough Abbey
relatives snoozing in the family living room, the religious structures, like the levelled homes, are preserved in the landscape. Levelled homes sit happily in the grounds of homes and farms, sometimes re roofed to become barns and stores. They could have been pulled down as eyesores, but they’re not. Desecrated abbeys, convents and churches stand as tended monuments with towns and villages growing around them. Or as centre pieces for graveyards, the locals clustering around them keeping them company with their own monuments, marking their brief stay on earth.
Gift shop Knock
Perhaps its the view of life on earth being a stepping stone to somewhere better that has let its often harrowing past rest so quietly in its monuments. The past and present and life and death, sit comfortably alongside each other in the general direction of brown tourist signs (as often as not down an unmarked onetrack road) and on the shelves of gift shops.