KILKENNY

WAS A MAJOR EUROPEAN BREWING CENTRE

Kilkenny Castle grounds

I HAVE ESTABLISHED THAT THIS IS NOT CROW’S WELL

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CANAL WALK IN KILKENNY JULY 2021 AND SEPTEMBER 2022

This series of images is from my July 2021 and September 2022 visits to Kilkenny.

This well is located on the Canal Walk on the bank of the River Nore. In 2018 a dog-walker told me that it is known as “Crow’s Well” but at the time I believed that she may have been incorrect as my understanding is that Crow’s Well Lock is at Fennessey’s Mill. However, I was unable to locate a well at Fennessy’s Mill [Archersgrove Mill] when I visited in September 2022. However, I recently discovered that Crow’s well was identified as Spa Well on some old maps and that the well, at Fennessey’s Mill, is so overgrown with briars and bushes that it is almost impossible to locate it.

The Kilkenny Canal is a short stretch of unfinished canal which was originally intended to make the River Nore navigable as far as Kilkenny City. Funding for the canal was provided by the Parliament of Ireland in 1755, to the value of £10,000. Work was abandoned in 1761, and no barges ever completed the journey from the navigable section of the Nore to Kilkenny.

The Canal Walk (parallel to Kilkenny Castle Grounds) is the third section of the Nore Linear Park

The trail begins at the Canal Square on Rose Inn Street where there is a new City pavilion with benches overlooking the Rivercourt hotel, in the shadow of the historic Kilkenny Castle. This is an attractive walk lined for much of its length with mature trees especially limes. The walk runs from Canal Square and terminates at Archersgrove Mills (also known as Fennessey’s Mill) . During Kilkenny Castle Park open hours it is possible to access the grounds of the Castle Park from the Canal Walk. An extension to the walk will eventually take you for miles into the countryside following the course of the River Nore towards the town of Inistioge.

ANCHORED VOID KILKENNY CASTLE

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BLACK STEEL SCULPTURE BY MICHAEL WARREN

I have seen, this in travel guides, named “Anchored Void” as well as “Void Anchored” but could not located it until I came across it while exploring a less visited area of Kilkenny Castle grounds.

In 2021, when I first photographed this somewhat isolated sculpture there was a thunder storm ongoing and I had to give up and return to my hotel room. This year the day started out wet but by the time I arrived at this sculpture it was really sunny and warm.

Michael Warren (born 1950 in Gorey, County Wexford, Ireland) is an Irish sculptor who produces site-specific public art.

Inspired by Oisín Kelly, his art teacher at St Columba’s College, Michael Warren studied at Bath Academy of Art, at Trinity College, Dublin and, from 1971–75, at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. He now lives and works in Co. Wexford.

He has a number of very visible works in Ireland, including the large sweeping wood sculpture in front of the Dublin Civic Offices. Wood Quay, where the civic offices stand, was the centre of Viking Dublin and the sculpture evokes the form, and the powerful grace, of a Viking ship. It also reflects vertically the horizontal sweep of the nearby Liffey as it enters its bay. A complex balance of meanings matching a delicate, though massive, balance of substance is typical of his work. Warren himself describes the useful ambiguity of abstraction (Hill 1998)

With Roland Tallon he created Tulach a’ tSolais (Mound of Light), a memorial to the 1798 rebellion. Here, a room was hollowed out of a small hill; the room contains two abstract curved oak forms and is illuminated by natural light falling through a long slot in its ceiling and walls. Despite the unusual and abstract constitution of this memorial and despite the fraught political resonance of the rebellion, Tulach a’ tSolais is popular and something of a local attraction. His Gateway in Dún Laoghaire was less popular with some local people and it was eventually removed and returned to the artist.

At the northern entrance to the village of Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, is a sculpture by Michael Warren, depicting the thrones of the ancient seat of the Kings of South Leinster at Dinn Righ (The hill of the Kings). The Kings of Leinster lived near the village.

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