In an increasingly homogenous world what often best defines and sets a city apart (aside from architecture, ambiance, culture and language) is its collection of one-off shops which seek to echo some aspect of that city’s uniqueness. Dublin’s much loved bookshop The Winding Stair, which sells both new and second-hand books, is a gem of a shop that manages to evoke the ghosts of Dublin’s rich literary past and yet remain grounded in the 21st Century. The bookshop is on the ground floor of a building on Ormond Quay, in the centre of Dublin; the equally well-loved Winding Stair restaurant is on an upper floor.
Tag Archives: Ireland
♥ Coffee in Dublin//Five: The Winding Stair
♥ The Waters and The Wild
As I was driving around Connemara, when I was there on a short break last month, I often stopped the car to get out and gaze in wonder at the surrounding scenery. As I looked at many magnificent combinations of mountains, lakes and the sea the refrain from William Butler Yeats’s poem The Stolen Child kept coming to mind. It is still, many weeks later, circling unbidden around my brain. The refrain is:
Filed under Musings
♥ Built for Love
Kylemore Castle (now know as Kylemore Abbey) in Connemara owes its existence to Mitchell Henry scion of a wealthy Mancunian family. Mitchell fell in love with Connemara when he and his wife Margaret honeymooned there in 1849. When he inherited the family fortune he returned to the West of Ireland and purchased, as a romantic gift for Margaret, 15,000 acres in an idyllic situation beside two lakes and overlooked by a multitude of magnificent mountains. There he built a gothic fairy tale like castle made of granite and limestone; the castle was completed in 1867.
Filed under Travel
♥ Postcard from Connemara
A rugged and hauntingly beautiful place, at the westerly edge of Europe, shrouded in clichés and sometimes in mist, the wild, windswept and wonderful landscape that is Connemara.
Filed under Travel
♥ Raspberry Road
I had a kaleidoscope of pleasing, peaceful, pastoral images floating around my mind as the car climbed the hilly, twisty road en route to the raspberry farm. I had never been there before so I imagined, I would be wandering among the raspberry canes idly picking fruit while simultaneous gazing at the misty mountains and admiring the verdant fields in the middle distance.
♥ Sartorial Story
Once upon a time, I applied for a place on an intensive two-year jewellery skills course, run by the Craft Council of Ireland. My application, as Oscar Wilde said in an entirely different context was ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. Well, lack of experience, actually, as my only exposure to jewellery making /designing was a couple of terms at a once a week two-hour evening class.
Filed under Musings
Just Add Attitude
Just Add Attitude 