The GCW Tour, A Few Bits of the UK and Ireland: A Day Trip Out of Dublin, Part 3 -- Glendalough

The last stop on our tour was at Glendalough, which I'm pretty sure is Gaelic for "swarms of people running roughshod over ground that at one point was considered holy," but I supposed I could've misunderstood. 

Anyway, Glendalough is a ruined monastery started by Saint Kevin -- no relation, I presume, though I suppose it's always possible that an Irish saint has been reincarnated as my pet cat --  sometime between 500 and 600 AD, which is now part of a nature reserve. Definitely a very pretty spot, with a whole lot of people visiting -- at least there were when we were there. Thank god for height, patience, a big memory card and a zoom lens, all of which make it easier to take deceptively isolated photographs.

But before we get to the pictures, I first have to pass along the most important thing I learned on the tour: the "Holy Cow!" was an actually cow.

It seems that when Saint Kevin, back when he was still just Kevin, decided he wanted to be a monk, he's parents weren't thrilled. So he went back and contemplated some more, and then came back and said, "nope, I want to be a monk." What's more, he told them, he wanted to take their cow with him when he left for monk school.

Kevin's parents, of course, are like, wait, first you want to leave us to run the farm by ourselves, and now you want to take our cow? Yeah, no. No cow. The cow stays. But when Kevin left, the cow followed him. Moreover, the cow's calf followed, too. So now Kevin has his parents' current cow and their future cow, and even he realizes that this may be asking too much, so he draws a line in the dirt between the cow and the calf, and the calf turns around and goes home.

The cow, however, continues to follow.

Kevin and the cow continue on, and at some point they come to a village (or the monastery or some other place where people are). Eventually, the villagers notice that Kevin's cow is an unusually awesome cow, producing way more milk than any of their cows. So they decide to investigate. The only thing they can figure out that Kevin's cow does that none of the other cows do is that, while he's asleep, Kevin's cow licks his foot. The foot licking is determined to be the cause of the abundant milk production, and, in fact, this will be one of the miracles that's cited when Kevin is elevated from plain old Kevin the monk to Saint Kevin in 1903.

And that is the story of the Holy Cow.

Anyway, here are some strategically timed and carefully cropped pictures from Glendalough...