Continuing with scenes from our trip to the UK and Ireland in 2000, this one is of the Irish town of Roscommon. Most of our tour was planned by Margaret and Bernard, who drove us all over Ireland, but we had told them that the only place we knew of where Maureen had roots was Roscommon, so they included an overnight stop there. It is not a place that gets a lot of attention from tourists, so it was interesting to see what an ordinary Irish town looked like. This scene is from my photo of the center of town, but I used some artistic license and inserted the very impressive Sacred Heart Catholic Church in the background. The church is not really visible from this spot, but it not very far away. The church is such an important part of Irish culture, that I wanted to put this beautiful building into my painting.
Our Irish tour continued through Donegal and into Northern Ireland. At the Giant's Causeway, we met another distant cousin, Andrew, and his wife, Stephanie, and they joined us for the next couple of days. A little further east along the coast, we came to Carrick a Rede, where a rope bridge connects a small rocky island to the mainland. It was put up many years ago for salmon fishermen, but it's now a popular tourist attraction. The bridge is 100 ft. above the surging surf and crossing it is pretty exciting. After some hesitation, we all made it across.
Then I decided to skip acoss the channel to Paris. After three weeks in the UK and Ireland, we flew to Paris and spent three days there. We saw a lot of the city, riding the Metro and walking for miles and we loved it. One day we walked way across town to Montmartre, where I took the photo that this painting is based on, a street view with the dome of the Sacre-Coeur basilica in the background. At the time I didn't really know exactly where we were, but with a lot of searching on Google Street View, I determined that it is on Rue Norvins, and that the big gate on the left is the entrance to La Folie Sandrin. I looked up this place and found that it is an eighteenth century mansion that was used as a mental hospital in the nineteenth century. The word "folie" means madness in French, but according to one french article, the name of the place came from an obsolete french word meaning "woods". I was surprised that with the high school french that I learned 60 years ago I could get the gist of the article, but maybe I understood less than I thought.
