Street Prophets Friday: Muckross House (photo diary/open thread)

Greetings! I suppose that most of you are still stuffed and a bit groggy. I spent Thanksgiving making a bucketful of stuffing, a small pot of turkey broth and four pumpkin pies. I added a crumbled cup of pecans to one and spread a melted a bar of dark chocolate over another for variety. Today is going to be our Thanksgiving. Abandoning tradition for the sake of harmony. These Czechs always complain that they have to get up and go to work on Friday. This year, and perhaps in the years to come, we caved in to the wheedling little wimps and opted to shift the schedule a bit to accommodate them. I'm not sure why I resisted for so long, the fourth Thursday in November wasn't chosen for any particular reason that I can recall. Feeling a bit sheepish for clinging to an arbitrary choice. About the time this diary posts from the queue our guests will be filing out the door and the work of clearing away the debris will have begun.

Anyway, it's good to be back on Daily Kos after some odd glitch (the Help Desk suspects it was a server-side issue) kept me from loading the site last week until mid-day on Saturday. Our dear Michele relayed my dilemma to the Help Desk folks, got me an email for me to contact them, and wrote up a nice, impromptu recipe diary for Friday's Street Prophets open thread. Many thanks, yet again, to Michele!

Now, on to the matter at hand and what I wanted to post last week: a bit of Old Killarney. Yes, it's another chapter of my trip to Ireland with a visit to Muckross House.

Muckross House

A grand, Tudor style mansion built in 1846 for the Herbert family who basically went broke gussying up the place and gardens for a visit by Queen Victoria in 1861 with the property eventually going up for auction in 1899, sold to one of the Guinness brothers of stout beer fame in Dublin. He barely spent any time there, renting it out as a recreational lodge. In 1911 the property was sold, this time to the Californian owner of the Empire gold mine and the San Francisco Gas Company. He gave the estate to his daughter as a wedding gift and she lived there until her death in 1929 from pneumonia. Her parents and husband decided to donate the house and vast, surrounding acreage to the Irish nation in 1932, becoming the first national park in the Republic of Ireland.