Dublin Castle had been the seat of British administrative power in Ireland. It’s still a government building and used for state functions notably including some of the negotiations leading to peace in Northern Ireland. The castle itself is only viewable via tours, but they do depart fairly regularly and our guide at least was excellent in addition to providing fairly snarky commentary for an official tour.
The artwork was a mix of Irish cultural heritage and British work with typically unsubtle themes. In various ways Hibernia, a woman symbolizing Ireland with a name originating in the Roman’s view of how cold the place was, would be shown as subordinate to Britannia. Speaking of British art, Amusing, the one throne had its legs cut off because the Queen Victoria was a bit shorter than the King that commissioned it and it wouldn’t do to have dangling legs.
In addition to the main castle tour, we got to see the foundations and some of the archeological record of the prior occupants. The castle grounds were always a defensible position back to when the Vikings first founded Dublin which was at the time known as Dublina. The name actually means dark pool for self-explanatory reasons. They believe the various fortresses were never actually conquered directly, this wasn’t where William of Orange won his conquest. The castles resilience was shown in a fairly morbid way, they had found a collection of skulls in what had been the moat, they’d presumably fallen there after having been mounted as a warning.
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