Yet again, we pull into a favourite stop off of ours – O’Brien’s Camping and Caravan site in Cashel, overlooked by the famous castle and rock. The castle was once the stronghold of Brian Boru, the first High King of Ireland. My father used to say we were related to royalty, which always confused me as a child, thinking of Buckingham Palace and Queen Elizabeth. He’d laugh and say that we were O’Briens – descended from the great Brian Boru. I think of him as I look up at the huge sandstone castle rising from the limestone rock. The rock rises out of the ground as if it is the scales of a sleeping dinosaur.
The red sandstone was imported from Devon in the 11th Century when Cormac’s Chapel was built, which is an amazing feat in itself. It always makes me dizzy when I think of people a millenium ago hewing those stones from mountains, trading across the seas and transporting them in boats which by today’s standards seem tiny and so vulnerable in the grip of winds and storms.
Irish mythology has it that the rock was formed when St. Patrick banished Satan from a cave in mountains to the north. Enraged, the devil bit a chunk out of the mountain, now called the Devil’s Bit, and spat the rock out into the Golden Vale to form the rock of Cashel.
O’Brien’s campsite is small, nestled in the Golden Vale. Dairy cattle graze in the field just opposite the site, with Gothic Hore Abbey’s brooding ruins in its centre. A noticeboard tells a tale of human foibles as the archbishop, David McCarvill, had a nightmare that the Benedictine monks of the abbey were plotting to murder him. Because of his dream, he evicted them.
We follow the walking trail up among the sheep grazing on the rock of Cashel, the castle walls soaring above us. Couples sit and picnic on the benches beneath it as we head off down to the town, past postcard-pretty, thatched cottages, and Kearney’s Tower, a 15th Century fortified tower.
Cashel Palace is now a hotel but was once a Church of Ireland Bishop’s palatial 18th Century residence, but we eschew the fancy hotel for Mikey Ryan’s Gastropub – a firm favourite of ours. From salmon cured by seaweed served with apple and cucumber sauce to pork rolled in prosciutto with Mediterranean vegetables and potatoes roasted in duck fat, we indulge ourselves with a royal feast, finishing with Irish cheeses.
As Seán works remotely in the van, I take off on St. Declan’s Way, often referred to as ‘The Irish Camino, an ancient pilgrim path, which goes by the campsite and eventually takes the hiker to Ardmore on the Waterford Coast. It is apparently the path St. Declan took from Ardmore with its ancient ecclesiastical ruins and round tower, on the coast, to visit St. Patrick at Cashel to plan how to convert the southern clans to Christianity.
Today, the sun shines on peaceful fields, mountains brooding on the horizon as I jog down a lane that squeezes narrower and narrower between high ditches and trees that form a tunnel above my head. It’s easy to believe I’m on a Game of Thrones film set.
Campervan Therapy 
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