Have you stayed in a castle in Ireland or Scotland?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No because all the Irish castles are gone. I don't want to stay in places built by the English who took the land, persecuted and starved the people.

Amen!

Hmmmm....I'm pretty darn Irish, and this wouldn't bother me. We took that land back, gosh darn it! (Or at least we took back MOST of it.). We should get to enjoy the castles built by our forebears on their stolen land. I think our great-great-great-great...grandparents would get a kick out of that, don't you think?

Just don't kiss the Blarney stone. I'm told by my Irish friends that drunk guys pee on it as a joke on the tourists.

Maybe it's b.c I'm second generation that it seems really personal to me. My family in Fermanagh is still a little salty about the history of invasion etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No because all the Irish castles are gone. I don't want to stay in places built by the English who took the land, persecuted and starved the people.

You live in a house built on lands stolen from the Native Americans who were kicked out of their lands and starved / died of diseases they had no resistance to.

Good luck being judgemental.

I'm also not being judgemental. You are being defensive. I never said that people who stay at castles in Ireland are bad people. I just choose not to. I prefer to seek out the more authentic Celtic sites. If I want to see an English or Norman Castle, I will go to England.

Pot calling kettle black? Your tone was quite judgemental.

And it's not true all Irish castles are gone. There are plenty of ruined tower houses that belonged to the old barons and some are still inhabitable. Truth be told, there was really nothing comparable to the castles of England or France because Ireland was a very primitive and wild and extremely impoverished and quite barbaric island long before the English invasions. The first proper castles in Ireland were the ones built by the Normans when they arrived in the 12th century, and it's up to you to decide if the Normans were sufficiently Irish enough (an old saying is that the Normans became more Irish than the Irish themselves).

Ok dude chill. I just prefer the Celtic sites. I think the "wild, barbaric" people were interesting. I love stumbling across stone circles and weird statues like the Celtic Janus. Been to Newgrange? I loved that and I went to a bunch of less restored places too in Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

I know some people have a thing for Celtic cultures, but I've never understood why. Most of the Celts were primitive people living in mud or stone huts and routinely raiding each other and killing each other and stealing each other's women and cattle and sheep, behaviors that by our standards must be considered pretty barbaric. There's a couple interesting cultural bits and some of the early Christian priests were Celts and did quite a lot, but the fiction supersedes the reality. Romanticizing history has always been a fun thing to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No because all the Irish castles are gone. I don't want to stay in places built by the English who took the land, persecuted and starved the people.

You live in a house built on lands stolen from the Native Americans who were kicked out of their lands and starved / died of diseases they had no resistance to.

Good luck being judgemental.

I'm also not being judgemental. You are being defensive. I never said that people who stay at castles in Ireland are bad people. I just choose not to. I prefer to seek out the more authentic Celtic sites. If I want to see an English or Norman Castle, I will go to England.

Pot calling kettle black? Your tone was quite judgemental.

And it's not true all Irish castles are gone. There are plenty of ruined tower houses that belonged to the old barons and some are still inhabitable. Truth be told, there was really nothing comparable to the castles of England or France because Ireland was a very primitive and wild and extremely impoverished and quite barbaric island long before the English invasions. The first proper castles in Ireland were the ones built by the Normans when they arrived in the 12th century, and it's up to you to decide if the Normans were sufficiently Irish enough (an old saying is that the Normans became more Irish than the Irish themselves).

Ok dude chill. I just prefer the Celtic sites. I think the "wild, barbaric" people were interesting. I love stumbling across stone circles and weird statues like the Celtic Janus. Been to Newgrange? I loved that and I went to a bunch of less restored places too in Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

I know some people have a thing for Celtic cultures, but I've never understood why. Most of the Celts were primitive people living in mud or stone huts and routinely raiding each other and killing each other and stealing each other's women and cattle and sheep, behaviors that by our standards must be considered pretty barbaric. There's a couple interesting cultural bits and some of the early Christian priests were Celts and did quite a lot, but the fiction supersedes the reality. Romanticizing history has always been a fun thing to do.

Would you say the same thing about Native American tribes? Also, if you go back far enough...this is how all humans lived. Read your "Guns, Germs and Steel" to figure out why some people became 'civilized'