At Bunratty Castle it was mediavel fight day. If ever there was a word in the English language that was designed so you can’t spell it correctly first time, it’s mediavel. Medieval. Yes, that’s it. I think. Perhaps the Hundred Years War was intially set off by a disagreement over how to spell medievel. Certainly people probably couldn’t wait for the mediavil era to end but they would have been aghast that it eventually turned into the rennaissonce.
The battle took place in a field near the castle and was a recreation of a time when the two famous clans of Munster, the McNamaras and the O’Briens, used to fight over everything. In this case, it was over who would own Bunratty Castle, a big impressive pile near Limerick with a nifty but expensive gift shop. The O’Briens’ seem to have been the smarter, or more cunning, of the two families. They let the McNamaras take the castle from the Normans, spend lots of time and money renovating and rebuilding it, then turned up and attempted to take the structure for themselves.
The battle recreationists (is that the term?) were overweight hippies, mostly from Dublin The most striking of them were a couple of blokes who both looked like the lead singer of the Commitments. In the battle recreation scenes the chieftan and champion of the McNamaras were played by the Commitments blokes and it got me thinking that heroes like Cu Chulainn and Finn McCool maybe weren’t the glamorous muscled heroes that you see in books but possibly squat prop forwards with ginger pony-tailed affros.
In the battle, the Commitments had beaten up some tall warriors in shiny armour. The McNamaras had lived to fight another day. Back in the real world apparently they gave up and let the O’Briens have their castle because they were so determined – more like lazy shites who couldn’t be bothered to build their own (although possibly they didn’t understand how planning application system worked in the 15th century). It seems tough on the McNamaras – one can imagine their chief going down on one knee and singing “Call me Mr Pitiful…”