Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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166 Below, Kells Priory is a great day trip from Kilkenny; Right, Kilkenny is a medieval town in southeast Ireland; Kilkenny's 12th- century castle gives you a glimpse into Ireland's past. People warn you about the nar- row roads, the tight turns, the sheep wandering out in front of your car. And, of course, there's the addi- tional challenge of driving on the left. But somehow, no one thinks to mention the 10-foot hedges that line both sides of most Irish highways, eliminating your ability to see around the famous bends and leav- ing you nowhere to go if you should need to suddenly jerk away from one of the many 18-wheelers laying claim to both lanes. This is day five of our two-week trip, and it turns out that today has more in store than a safe drive. We don't yet know it, but this will be one of the best days of our trip: a day when, as the Irish say, the road will rise up to meet us and the wind will be at our backs. It's a day when little accidents of luck will line up to create a series of small, beautiful moments. In the morning, we start out from our temporary base in Kilkenny, a medieval town in the southeast of Ireland, where a grand 12th-century castle sits just across the river from our hotel. The sky is blue and full of fluffy, low-lying white clouds, but they do nothing to obscure the sun, which lights up the countryside in a kaleidoscope of green. We've planned our first stop, the ruins of Kells Priory, but noth- ing beyond that. When we pull up to the ruins of the 12th-century monastic site, we're all alone, save for the dozens of grazing sheep that foreground the stone struc- tures, and a vista of rolling green hills unfolds in the distance. It's the exact Ireland we'd imagined when T he hills are green, but my knuckles are white. TRAVEL we planned the trip, and we snap a few quick photos and then step inside the postcard. A little pamphlet purchased from an honor box tells us a bit about the site's past, how the walls between the tower houses were designed to stand up to raids, and photograph by Richard Semik, by Artur Bogacki (opposite top), by Bjoern Alberts/Shutterstock (opposite bottom)