Birr Castle (Ireland - Day 2)

After spending a night in Dublin, we headed off for County Clare, home to the Cliffs of Moher.


About halfway between Dublin and Doolin, the small village where we planned to spend the next two nights, is the tiny town of Birr. We decided to stop there to check out Birr Castle and grounds which have been owned by the Parsons family since the early 1600's. This site attracted us because of it's ties to the history of science and engineering. The Parsons family tree is full of famous Irish scientists, engineers, and astronomers. They are most known for Charles Parsons' design of the turbine generator which became the world's most important means of producing bulk electric power. The castle's stable house had been converted into a pretty significant science history museum of the family's contributions and it was neat to see the different prototypes created over the years. They are also quite well known in the world of astronomy. Birr Castle was home to this, the largest telescope in the world until 1915:


At the risk of boring those of you who are a bit less nerdy than Jason and I, here's a bit from the family's website about this amazing contribution to astronomy:

Lord Rosse spent over three years building his next large telescope, "The Leviathan of Parsonstown" based around a 72 inch (183 cm) mirror, with which he hoped to confirm that some of the nebulae contain stars, hints of this being given by the 36 inch telescope. This telescope was basically a 17 m tube, suspended between two 15 m high walls, with a network of supports which enabled the tube to be moved freely in a vertical direction, but restricted horizontal movement...the mirror was cast in the grounds of the Castle, using 3 large crucibles and resulting in a mirror that weighed over 3 tons. Construction of the telescope and mountings took over 2 years but finally, on 15 February 1845, the weather cleared long enough for a short viewing of the double star Castor, which confirmed the potential of the new telescope. In April 1845, Lord Rosse was able to deduce the spiral nature of the M51 nebulae.

The castle itself is still leaved in, so we weren't able to go inside, but the acres of beautiful grounds and gardens are open to the public year round.

Jason and I in front of the castle moat:


Jason with "The Leviathan of Parsonstown" in the distance:


The formal garden:


We enjoyed wandering the castle grounds so much that it was hard to pull ourselves away to get back in the car, but knowing that sunset was coming and that we still had many miles of narrow, winding roads ahead, we finally desided to continue on our way to Doolin....