So, this past Saturday, we returned from the Republic of Ireland. What a wonderful time! I’m so grateful to have been able to make this trip with Tim, to have seen a new-to-me country and landscape, and to have learned that the most famous of the “high kings” of Ireland was a guy named Brian.

The pictures and captions below offer some of the highlights of the sights we saw around Dublin. One thing I didn’t get any pictures of, though, was a particular exhibit at the National Museum. The exhibit was called “Kingship and Sacrifice,” and it featured preserved human remains, discovered in peat bogs around Ireland, dating from the Iron Age. The “bog bodies” are believed to have been the victims of human sacrifice, and they still have hair, and fingernails, and sinew and stuff — even though some of them are more than two thousand years old. They were really gross to look at, but the whole idea has stuck with me. It’s the idea of encountering preserved remains, so far in the future from when those folks last walked, talked and breathed our air, that really fascinates me.

Hopefully, these pictures are a lot more palatable than the bog bodies.

Next week, I’ll post some photos of the things we saw during the two days we ventured away from Dublin.