Another contender

THERE’S another contender in the race to find a new favourite building.

This row of tired but terribly elegant terrace houses, which have certainly seen better days, sit on the main road between downtown London and Heathrow Airport which means literally thousands of visitors pass by the vintage complex in the course of a day.

I don’t know a single thing about the elongated building, but I suspect it is Victorian because of the ornate architectural flourished that were popular in the days after a young queen followed four kings named George onto the British throne.

Imagine living in an era when you could build a row of terrace houses and give each individual dwelling a big picture window that occupied most of the front wall?

And imagine how elegant these dwellings would have been in the days when Queen Victoria and her Albert were taking carriage rides around Hyde Park which is just a couple of kilometres up the road?

Welcome to London

LIKE the signs on the Heathrow Airport luggage carts say...welcome to London.

A Titanic town

OUR tour of Ireland continued today, but before we could check into our Cork hotel and explore the southern city we drove to the harbour-side settlement of Cobh to do a walking tour with a local historian.

Cobh – it’s pronounced Cove – is an important place in Irish history because, as our guide Michael Martin explained, it’s been ``visited, invaded, arrived at and departed from’’ for literally dozens of centuries.

In the years since 1000BC the Phoenicians, Celts, Normans, Vikings and British Navy have come and gone – some more peacefully than others – but it was an event that happened in 1912 that put this place on the map.

Cobh was the last place the Titanic stopped before pointing her bow towards New York and heading into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean, anchoring at the heads of Cork Harbour for 90 minutes on April 11 to take on passengers and mail.

Seven passengers disembarked that day, including Father Francis Brown who was the Jesuit priest that spent 24 hours on the ship as she travelled from Southampton to Cobh and took the only surviving photos of ship-board life on the inaugural voyage.

Cobh hasn’t changed much in the 99 years since Titanic visited, and today visitors can walk in the footsteps of the 123 souls that boarded the ship that afternoon when she was tied up in the mouth of the harbour just beyond Spike Island, and look at the view they saw as they headed out to the vessel.

The White Star office is still there (above left), as is the wooden wharf they stood on to climb down to the tenders (above right), and many of the buildings that line the front street are the guest houses those passengers spent their last night on land in.

The last person to get off Titanic as she steamed away from Cobh and the Irish coast was pilot John Cotter, and his house still stands in a cluster of colourful terraces on the side of a slope).

Cotter's house isn't far from the place you can stand to look through a break in the fence and see the gap in the land past Spike Island where Titanic anchored on April 11.

"After Jamestown was established in 1607 a steady stream of ships began to make the journey back and forth between Britain and the United States, and Cove Harbour was the last large safe port of call before they headed out into the Atlantic," historian Michael Martin explained as we walked.

"All the big cruise lines had an office here – White Star, Cunard, Holland American – and Cobh became the O’Hare Airport of yesteryear, it was the hub of trans-Atlantic traffic.

"More than half the immigrants who went to America during the Famine left from Cobh, and even some of the convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land went from here, so that history has endowed this place with a strong military, maritime and immigration history.

"Walking around Cobh it’s easy to peel back the layers of history."

As we walked along the Cobh’s main street Michael explained that the buildings in the bowl around the old wharf haven’t changed since 1912, and the only addition to the skyline is the steeple at the church on the hill above the town.

We strolled the same footpath the Titanic passengers walked along as they headed to the White Star office to check in for their journey – the first and second-class customers got to go inside, the steerage travellers were processed outside – and saw the memorial to those who died when the great ship sank.

Titanic isn’t the only doomed passenger ship with a link to Cobh – the Cunard vessel Lusitania sank off the Old Head of Kinsale, not far from Cork Harbour, when she was hit by the torpedo fired from a German U-boat on May 7, 1915.

The grand ship, which was making her 202^nd trans-Atlantic crossing at the time, was near the end of her journey from New York to Liverpool when stalked by the submarine and she sank in just 18 minutes after the torpedo hit her starboard side.

Almost 2000 people died that day, with a band of brave Cobh mariners venturing out to rescue 700 passengers who managed to get away from the vessel before is disappeared below the surface, and the sinking of the civilian Cunard vessel was the event that bough the United States into the Great War.

There’s a monument to the Lusitania in Cobh’s town square, with the memorial celebrating the town’s fishermen and mariners who volunteered to brave the dangerous waters to rescue the survivors.

Surf and turf

AFTER spending a few hours in Waterford today we boarded our bus for the two-hour drive to our overnight stop near the village of Mallow in Cork County.

We're spending the night at Longueville House - a 19th-century farm with a stately old home that's been converted to a 20-room hotel - and enjoying the hospitality of the owners who work the land and serve their produce to the guests at mealtime.

Our driver Jim had two options when it came to making the journey from Waterford to Mallow, and elected to follow the more scenic route along the coast and then through a picturesque farming valley so we could see enjoy the view.

This part of Ireland is called the Copper Coast - there used to be a copper mine operating on the top of one of the windswept cliffs - and the ocean vistas were lovely with green paddocks giving way to sheer walls of rock that dropped severely the ocean.

Once we turned inland we meandered through a bucolic valley, with farm houses dotting the landscape and flocks of black-faced sheep and cows grazing on glass that looked like green velvet when viewed from a distance.

- Posted from my iPad

Crystal palace

OUR main stop today was in the Irish city of Waterford.

Those who like a crystal vase or goblet will know the settlement well, as this is the place that's been home to the famous Waterford Crystal factory since 1783.

Two brothers started the company and they chose the location because it had a good port to distribute their creations to the world and was surrounded by forests that would provide wood the feed the hungry furnaces.

There were two short periods when there was no crystal production in Waterford, between 1851 and 1947 when a crippling tax was put on luxury goods and for a few months in 2009 and 2101 when the company went belly up.

The residents feared the town would die when the factory closed in 2009, because the business bought so many tourists to the spot, so there was a collective sign of relief when an American firm bought the operation and opened a new workshop right in Waterford.

Only a fraction of the workforce was re-employed to make the ''trophy pieces'' that are today created in the Waterford plant, and now these craftsmen work their trade while bus loads of tourists file past.

And these men - they were all men today - are real artisans and train for eight years before becoming qualified crystal makers who can blow the glasses, vases and bowls before carving the iconic patterns into the beautiful vessels.

When I cast my eye over this trip's itinerary before departing Australia the tour of the Waterford factory didn't jump out as being a potential highlight, but it turns out the visit to the plant was an hour well spent.

The tour was very well done, with a guide leading visitors past a collection of stations, and we got to see every stage in the process of creating the bespoke pieces.

Here are a couple of pictures that will show you the process, from blowing and turning the crystal to engraving the pattens on the pieces.

Picture perfect

HERE’S a selection of pictures from my journey today to show you just how beautiful Ireland really is.

This collection was snapped near the village of Glendalough, which is a 90-minute drive south from Dublin, at the place where St Kevin established his monastic settlement back in the 600s.

It occurred to me, as I was walking around the ruins of the colony, that if Kevin Rudd was Kevin Oh-Seven then the saint was Kevin Seven.

And it seems the two Kevies have a few things in common.

Both locked themselves away for days at a time - St Kevin to pray in a cave high above a lake and K Rudd in his office in Parliament House to formulate policy and legislation without consulting his comrades.

St Kevin wasn't keen on women, and there's a story that he pushed a girl down a hill when she came to visit him in his cave, and we all know about the trouble Ruddly had with those RAAF flight attendants on the VIP flight.

- Posted from my iPad

Rainy days

THE weather for my first visit to Ireland has been very average.

Actually, Dublin in June looks a whole lot like Melbourne in the middle of winter with lots of wet and cold.

The locals tell me this wintry blast is most unseasonal and last week the parks were full of people perched in deckchairs enjoying the sunshine, you couldn't get a seat on the open-top tourist bus, and that ice-cream sellers were doing a roaring trade.

Looking on the bright side, there is a lot of light in this part of the world during the summer months with the morning sky beginning to get bright around 4.30am and not turning dark again until a touch before 10pm.

Continuing to be an optimist, the glass-half-full aspect of regular rain showers is that Ireland is at its very greenest with the paddocks covered by those 40 shades of green that Johnny Cash used to sing about.

All the water falling from the sky is good for Ireland's many stately gardens, some of which are open for tourists who can stroll the grounds doing self-guided walks or just sit to admire the work of the teams of green thumbs employed to keep the spaces looking magnificent.

We visited one of these beautiful estates today, Mount Usher Garden in Ashford just south of Dublin, and got to see the grounds at their very best with light beads of rain resting on the delicate petals of the colourful blooms.

The garden was established by Dublin businessman Edward Walpole in the 1860s, after he purchased an old mill on the banks of the River Varty to be close to the Wexford hills that he loved exploring during his holidays, and started planting the casual gardens.

Mount Usher stayed in the family until an irresponsible son spent the family fortune on some bad investments and the derelict estate was eventually purchased by the matriarch of the Jay clan as the place she would spend her retirement.

Mrs Jay spent a lot of money restoring the grounds and lived in the big house by the Varty until her son decided he wanted to estate's main abode and moved his mother into a garden cottage.

Today there's a park bench set on one bank of the river, near a tree that's home to a colony of bats, and Mrs Jay rests in the seat to admire the view of the trees hanging over the rapids when she takes her daily strolls around the property.

  

- Posted from my iPad

By Georgian

IF you like a Georgian building, then Dublin is the place to be.

The streets of the Irish capital are lined with the most handsome Georgian structures, four-storey buildings that were thrown up between 1720 and 1840 during the reign of the four British kings named George.

At the time Dublin was considered to be the second most important city in the British Empire - London was the first, but there was so much international business being conducted in this Irish settlement during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that it became a hub of trade and commerce - and a building boom took place

All the Georgian buildings you see in Dublin today were built on vacant land during this time, rather than replacing structures that had gone up in earlier decades and been knocked down to make way for progress.

When Dublin was first settled by the Vikings, and later the Normans, the inhabitants lived in a small settlement inside a great wall, and didn't feel the need to expand because they were close to the River Liffey which offered adequate port facilities.

But during the Georgian boom, when the city was a centre for trade, a deep-water port was needed so the settlement grew towards the coast with the elegant structures of the time going up to accommodate upper and middle-class families.

Unlike Victorian, which followed the era of the four Georges and was known for its fancy details, Georgian architecture was defined by its simple lines and uncluttered facades.

Most buildings were four storeys tall, with three or four windows across the front of each house, and there were reception rooms on the two lower floors and living rooms on the next two levels.

The ground floor would accommodate the informal reception rooms, where the residents would conduct business or meet with unimportant guests, while the first level housed the grand formal reception room that was the place to welcome important visitors.

This space, which ran across the front of the building and had three of the house's tallest windows to capture most of the day's light, was at the top of a grand staircase so valued visitors would ascend the steps and make an entrance when they arrived.

The adults occupied the bedrooms on the third floor, and the children and the servants on the top floor, and a second network of steps at the rear of the structure so the help wouldn't invade the family's living area as they worked.

When you stand at one end of a Dublin street, and peer along the Georgian facades, the buildings looks the same with uniform lines of windows and only the detail of the wrought-iron balconies making one dwelling unique from those around it.

And the windows get smaller as the floors get higher, with the glass on the first level being the tallest - to let sunlight into the important reception rooms - and those on the top storey bedrooms the smallest.

This was done to reflect the ceiling heights of the rooms that sat behind the windows, and not only did the spaces get less important as you climb, but the spaces were build to be smaller and easier to heat in the middle on a cold day.

- Posted from my iPad