TRIM CASTLE

Trim Castle is the largest Anglo-Norman castle in Ireland and was constructed over a 30 year period by Hugh de Lacy and his son Walter. The construction was begun in 1173. It is situated on the River Boyne and the present ruins occupy an area of two acres. At one period Prince Henry (later Henry V) was kept prisoner here.
This is on the way to Trim Castle. Ireland has really cool old churches here.

This is the town of Trim. The blue building on the right is The Castle Restaurant. We went to this after we got done with our tour of the castle and found out it was just a burger place where you went to the counter and got your burgers and then sat down. If you look to the left you'll see a yellow building. After we saw they only had burgers, we left and went back across the street to that yellow building which was a tourist shop and a coffee shop where we had hot soup and brown bread and quiche. Lot's better.

This is the front of the "false entrance". I'll tell more about this later.

This is the entrance to Trim Castle. Look at the sign on the right. The top is written in Gaelic, like every single sign in Ireland - always Gaelic on the top and English on the bottom.

I'm standing in the entryway looking up at the Keep - the main house.

I'm not quite sure what these next ones are. I think the first one is part of another house that they built once they moved out of the Keep.


Standing in front of the archway.

Close-up of previous picture.

This is the outside of the Keep. It is the main house where the family lived. See the rough-looking stone? It is where one of the columns broke off. If you look to the right you can see the other column.

We are inside the Keep on the bottom floor looking up into the main part of the inside. Down further is a picture where I am up on the top floor taking a picture looking down into this room.

This is me and I have my hood on because it is so FREEZING cold here. Even though they put a "roof" (like a hard tent top) on the Keep when they refurbished it for tours, it is still very cold in here, but at least we are out of the wind. They have plastic on the windows, but in the days of the castle, believe it or not they actually had glass. This room is the sheriff or constable's room where he lived. He was hired by the castle owner. Sort of like his own personal security guard. The castle owner also could have had as many as 20 knights, but probably had only about 7 or 8.

This is looking down in the main part of the keep. If you look, you can see several doorways. Imagine that each doorway had a wooden floor that went all the way across. As you can see there would have been several floors to this Keep.

Standing inside one of the round turrets.

These next few pictures are looking off the top of the roof of the "Keep" (the house part). This picture shows the back of the entrance that we came in, which was the actual entrance to the castle yard. This part is gross, but funny: They would take buckets of excrement (human, from the family) and smear it on the walls of the entrance. They might even have a bucket or bowl of it by the front entrance. That way the people of the town, or the people who came to visit could look at the color of their poop and see that they were, basically rich - the darker the color, the more well-fed they supposedly were.

This is more of the house that the family built later. Once people got a little more peaceful they didn't need to live in the Keep and built a house that was more one level and easier to get in and out of as well as live in.

This was their "false entrance". They built this to "fake" people out to think it was actually the real entrance to the castle. It is built in such a way that if they got inside this tower, one person could pretty much defend the castle. The stairs are real narrow and they are circular so that if you were up the stairs and were trying to fight someone trying to come up, you could easily poke your sword with your right hand around the curve of the stairs and stab someone without exposing yourself. The person coming up the stairs will have their sword in their right hand, most likely, and would have to expose their whole body in order to try to stab you. Makes you see the reason why - like in the movie "Princess Bride" when the main character meets the guy who is trying to avenge his father's death ("My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!"), they sword fight and you find out that both of them can use a sword in either their right hand or their left hand.

This is looking off of the roof at a cool church in Trim.

This is a horrible picture of me, but see that wooden thing I have my hand on? It is the thing they strapped Mel Gibson to in "Braveheart" at the end of the movie when they killed him. They let the townspeople of Trim be the people in the movie that watch him be killed, and the "executioner" was actually a school teacher from Cork. :0) I thought it was cool that they let the people be in that last scene. The tour guide told us if we touched it we might not ever want to wash our hands since that is probably the closest we'd ever get to Mel Gibson, but my OCD kicked in and I actually washed them right after this when we went to eat lunch. :0+