Mary Magdalen

What a great day! It's National Heritage Week here and someone was doing a walk around Cork City looking at pilgrimage sites and holy wells. Oh Yes! Two very charming and knowledgeable people lead a select but very erudite group of us around some very obscure places. It was fantastic! We started at St Finbarr's Cathedral, listened to the story of Cork's patron saint and admired a newly cut turf labyrinth; then we went off into the back streets and arrived at this tiny graveyard, jam-packed with nuns, for yes it was the burial site of a convent. We were there to look at the grave of Nano Nagel but I was more transfixed by all these other lives - sister Mary Magdalen for example, a nun here for 51 years. What can her life have been like? The convent and adjoining school now looking dilapidated and austere and the nuns have long since departed. Onwards across the city to another huge baroque church but here we admired a tiny 14C statue of the BVM, made from ivory and supposedly washed ashore from France in a tree trunk. Still much venerated - a very ancient chap came up to replenish the candle supplies whilst we were there. Our final destination was the Fransiscan Well - once the site of yes, a Fransiscan Abbey plus holy well, but now the site of a different kind of watering hole, famous in Cork for brewing its own beer. The well is tucked away against a wall in the open air smoking area of the pub and we astonished a young couple having a quiet moment by climbing up onto benches to to peer down into the well. The tour ended here but the wood-fired pizza oven had just been lit and Himself and I decided to stay and have lunch - a huge Quatro Formaggio pizza (excellent) and some home brew - also pretty good.
Back  home and I decided to risk a swim - seriously fresh.

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