Russell Shortt is a travel consultant with Exploring Ireland, the leading specialists in customised, private escorted tours, escorted coach tours and independent self drive tours of Ireland. Article source Russell Shortt, http://www.exploringireland.net http://www.visitscotlandtours.com
You won’t find St. Michan’s Church in any of your run of the mill guidebooks, the place is just too scary to have trusting tourists wandering into. The place drips with history, the existing structure is built on the original site of a Viking chapel dating from the eleventh century. The existing church was built in 1685 and Handel tinkled the ivories of the organ here whilst composing The Messiah, indeed the organ still sits proudly in the church. So far so good, indeed, but then you enter the vaults…and you discover that St. Michan’s has a rather disturbing element to it -it is chock full with mummies! Yes, chillingly, it’s vault is a mummy sanctuary which you can simply just stroll into. You disappear down a narrow staircase and stumble into long galleries stuffed with coffins, many of which are wide open, you find yourself staring into the vacant eyes of their long dead residents. Bizarrely, many of the long suffering residents don’t fit their coffins, it would appear that back in the day, the person was adapted to fit the coffin rather than the other way around, for legs and arms stick out this way and that. It gets worse, in one of the chambers lie four open coffins, with the bodies chopped into pieces so that their occupants can fit into them. And get this, these ain’t skeletons , they still have skin, admittingly leathery but skin nonetheless! So if you’re rambling around Dublin, pop in and pay these guys a visit, they’re dying to meet you!
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