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 | Dublin Christchurch Cathedral Reviews | Tips 1 - 10 of 24 |  |
 | |  |  | Christchurch Cathedral: Entrance to the Cathedral | Tip Rating:    |  |  | |  |
As you enter the grounds you will be directed for entry into the building to the area just at the intersection of the two building faces shown on the attached photo. For future reference, if you tour the Dublinia -which I will show later- you will exit that portion of the facility here as well.
This main entry leads you to the back of the Cathedral where you will be immediately welcomed at the visitor station. The Cathedral asks you here for a donation to help sustain the building. In my opinon, this is money very well spent, so donate what you can afford. These old gems require a LOT of repair, attention and maintenance, so our contributions are certainly being enlisted in a good and worthy cause.
The information desk has several pamphlets and printed material handouts available to introduce you to the history services schedule, and current functions of this great building. I brought a few home with me and will try to scan them here later for inclusion in these pages. I hope I remember to come back and edit this text after I do that little chore!!
One of the handouts, a scavenger hunt of architectural elements throughout the building, is really fun and something you should certainly get. It's printed particularly in mind for children, but as an adult, I got a BIG charge out of it myself.
It includes about a dozen things to search for throughout the building, such as Strongbow's casket (simple to find), the Lord Mayor's seal, the mumified cat and mouse, and a lot of other neat things to discover, so do make sure you get this little pamphlet to help you along. I'll scan mine and include it here to give you an idea of what it looks like. The lady at the info desk when I was there was a new volunteer and didn't have the slightest idea what I was asking for until I later found one, took it back to her and showed her. She thought it was pretty cool after that. Be sure to include this in your investigation of this great building. Leave a Comment
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| | | | Christchurch Cathedral: Flying buttresses | Tip Rating: | | | | |
Here is an excellent example of the structural component that allowed construction of our tall masonry buildings; the flying buttress.
The walls of tall masonry buildings have to be designed to handle the tremendous outward weight thrusting upon them from the roof. The first way people learned to resolve the structural problem was to design very thick walls.
As the desire to build higher and higher came to play however, they found through disastrous consequences that the walls either had to be extremely thick to carry the roof load, or they had to come up with an alternative design.
It took awhile, but finally someone discovered that the load from above was thrusting in an angled line and could be handled by extending several relief walls perpendicular to the main building, rather than thicken the entire wall. That saved space, material, construction time, and money, and that, no matter which age you live, is ALWAYS good.
Not long after this discovery , they then began to notice that only the outward portion of the abuttment actually carried the load. The portion in the middle of the wall wasn't carrying any load except itself. With the advent of the arch, they learned that portions of a vertical wall could also be removed.
These discoveries led to removing portions of the abuttment, which in turn led to the much more elegant and fanciful design we see today. This structural element is called the flying buttress and is shown here to the left. Leave a Comment
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| | | | Christchurch Cathedral: Looking towards the entrance to the Dublinia | Tip Rating: | | | | |
As you approach the arch you will begin to see the entrance to the Dublinia, which in this photo is just abeam of the white car.
The photograph also shows the O'Donovan Rossa Bridge crossing the Liffey along Wood Quay. The red cars in the far middle of the photo are actually on the bridge, so this can give you a relative idea of how close the Liffey is to Christ Church. It's not far, although the walk between the Quays and Church along Winetavern Street is not very interesting these days, in my opinion.
It probably was a very interesting place to be in the medieval ages though, when the street's namesake was alive with pubs and taverns serving a bustling crowd just inside the castle walls. This would have been THE place to be if you had time to kill and money to burn, knocking down the original brews of Dublin's early days.
Fishamble Street was across the other side of the Cathedral, which gives you a good idea of the type of merchants and locals you would find in this particular neighborhood. This would be the domain of the real, common Dubliner, the salt of the earth no matter where you're from.
The inhabitant clientele would probably have consisted of some merchants, soldiers serving the castle, local residents, farmers coming in to town selling whatever goods they could produce, and general passersby. Marc (Lochlainn) has some great information about the early history of Winetavern Street, so I'll see if I can find how to reference you to his writings describing the area.
Pretension of the upper classes would probably be on the eastern side of the castel, with this area along Wood Quay serving as the epicenter for everyone in middle ages Dublin. To me, this would be theplace to be, and I would dearly love to have been there slugging down those ales right in the middle of it. A nice medieval ages tankard and a pretty wench. Ah, that's the life!!!...................uhm,....except for the dentistry, of course.
I learned from Marc while there in Dublin, that back in the middle ages, brewing was the explicit domain of women. There's probably an entire history waiting to be uncovered discovering the origins and ultimate fate of scores of famous brews from these early brewmistresses, so I'll see what I can uncover and let you know. Leave a Comment
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on January 9, 2004
on October 19, 2003
