I’d done a lovely walking tour of my neighborhood with a local guide, back when I’d first moved into my apartment here in the Liberties. I hadn’t planned on taking another tour… but my friend Brian was visiting, so when I saw the open invitation I’d floated the idea by him. Unsurprisingly, he was quite excited for the chance to learn a bit of the more personal history of the area, so we roused ourselves vaguely early one morning, and made our way onward for the tour!
As before, it was simply lovely. Anthony was (and likely still is) an amazing guide – we walked, he shared stories of the neighborhood, and we got the opportunity to learn more about the personal history of this small portion of Dublin. Stories about the local personalities, about the industries that had shaped the area, and even about some small turns of phrase that were born here.
I can’t recall if I mentioned it in my post about the first tour I took, but my favorite phrase from Dublin is “Beyond the Pale”. In short, back many years ago, Dublin itself was known as “the pale”. Or, more accurately, the fence around Dublin was a “Pale”… and so anything outside the city was “Beyond the Pale”, or a place that good folk wouldn’t go.
It was a fun tour, and a great opportunity to take a lovely walk while connecting a bit more with this new place that I call home.
I am now a resident of Dublin 8, specifically an area known as The Liberties.
It’s a beautiful section of the city – close to the central city, an 8min bike ride from Trinity, and a short walk from pretty much everything I could ask for. The view out my window is unequivocally Dublin – The Guinness Brewery rises to one side, St Patrick’s Cathedral to the other, and the John’s Lane Church (Church of St Augustine and St John) soars right in the middle.
It’s beautiful, and I was ecstatic to hear that the community manager for my apartment would be organizing a walking tour of the neighborhood. I signed up immediately.
I knew I was a gentrifier, since towering steel and glass monstrosity, but I didn’t quite realize the scope of the situation until our guide started explaining it all to us. The Liberties is an old part of Dublin, and had historically been a fairly low income area… It’s not a bad, or dangerous, neighborhood by any means, but it’s also not a thriving or wealthy neighborhood.
Our guide walked us through the town – showing us some amazing landmarks, some challenging parts of history, and some very interesting little tidbits about the town.
It all crystallized into a clear picture to me – this was a community, nothing like what I’d left behind in Oregon. As we walked, our guide’s family members popped out their doors or windows to say hi. His Grandma waved from a balcony, and his niece and nephew swept by on their bikes. Friends came out to welcome us, and schoolkids that he’d taught shouted greetings from the other side of the street.
It was vibrant, and lived in, and growing.
I can’t wait to get to know it better.
A few standout things to mention: – We saw the oldest fruit tree in Ireland! A pear tree, over 200 years old. – We walked through a community park, brand new, that the people of the Liberties had been lobbying for for years, and had finally gotten approved. – We had the opportunity to see a small community test garden, used to help bring schoolkids out of the city and into a small oasis of growing things – Our guide is a beekeeper, who runs a series of 50+ hives throughout Dublin, ensuring the pollinator population remains strong
After exploring the graduation tower, and braving the heat and light of the day, I was ready to descend back into the cool salty depths of the welcoming Earth.
I mentioned that, back when I was first looking at visiting Wieliczka, I realize that I’d need to book tours to explore the mines. And that, if I needed to book them anyways, I may as well pre-book… so I went online, read up on the options, and tracked down some tickets. I picked the Tourist’s route, of course, as it was the most popular and most extensive… but I saw a second options as well called The Miner’s Route.
The Miner’s route included a disclaimer – warning me that it would be dark, include some scrambling through tight place, and would be a bit more physically challenging than the Tourist’s Route. After seeing that, all hesitation left my mind and I got the tickets locked in.
We started off in a locker room, gearing up for our shift in the mines.
It was fairly straightforward, but still quite interesting – We had our overalls, of course, but were also issued / given a hardhat, helmet lamp, and an emergency CO2 filter mask. Cool, and a fun part of the experience, right? Well, yes… but also legally required, it turns out. See, part of this tour was that we were going into some of the semi-working mine areas. While Wieliczka isn’t a truly “Active” mine anymore, they do still extract about 10,000 tons of salt per year. That’s mainly to fill their giftshop, and pales in comparison to the 203,000 tons per year that the mine produced at its height in the interwar period from 1918 to 1939… though it quite impressive in comparison to the 8,000 tons per year extracted by the laborers back in the 14th and 15th centuries.
That brief history lesson aside, we were required to carry safety gear with us – though with the interesting caveat that the safety gear is required for coal mines, and wouldn’t be helpful in a salt mine… Which, in my mind at least, cemented the guide’s credibility. Since, let’s be honest, legal codes being written for something else, and ignoring the small outlier, really fits well with my understanding of the world we live in.
We finished gearing up, and headed into the mines.
A map of the mines, courtesy of the Wieliczka website!
The Miner’s Route was, unsurprisingly, not nearly as touristy-picturesque as the Tourist’s Route. Instead, it was more of a dive into the workings of the mines – how miners had actually extracted the salt, how they’d built the mines, and what sort of condition’s they’d had to contend with.
One of the most interesting, to me at least, was compaction – as time wore on, the mines would settle and the remaining salt would compact. The wooden support pillars would take on the weight, in theory, but over time they’d slowly get crushed until they reached an equilibrium… Our “foreman” stopped us at one area to show just how intense the compaction was – the tunnel we were currently in had shrunk significantly before reaching equilibrium, with one specific wooden log being crushed to about 1/3 of its original thickness!
We walked, navigated the corridors using a map, scrambled through small passageways, tested the air for methane, and even sawed a log! Best of all, we were “paid” for our work with small chunks of rocksalt! Interestingly, approximately the same amount that a laborer would have been paid in ages past – instead of being paid in currency, we learned, the laborers were simply paid in chucks of salt as it was equally valuable to hard coinage of the time.
While the Miner’s route wasn’t as picturesque as the Tourist’s Route, it was absolutely lovely. I believe we spent a full 3 hours in the mines, with our exploring and various activities, though it definitely felt like less. In the end we were given our miner’s certificates, took the elevator up, and returned our safety gear (thankfully) unexpended.
I packed back up my things, called myself a cab, and headed back to Krakow for some well earned dinner… amazing memories in my head, photos in my camera, and one major life goal completed.
