Irish Hunger Memorial...

We walking from Tribeca down near Battery Park yesterday, walking along the Hundson River and down all the different piers down there. Battery Park's such a lovely area, we'd not really been there much before but yesterday we had a good mooch and it was really peaceful and relaxing.

The only time we'd really been there before was to go to the Shake Shack there, when we went we spotted a weird looking rockery type thing and wondered what it was. So this time, when we saw it again we went to investigate.

It turns out it's the Irish Hunger Memorial. Some Irish ruins had been moved from Ireland to New York and reconstructed (seems odd to reconstruct ruins!) along the Hudson River...

The whole thing is raised to a slant, with an entrance way round the back...

In the walls of the entrance way are made of Irish rock and have quotes and facts about the potato famine in the light strips leading you through to the rockery bit...

Through out the rockery there are boulders that have been donated by each county in Ireland - they each have the name of their county engraved in the rock...

It's a very clever memorial - although the stones of the ruin are all very clean and look like new, when you're on the memorial you do feel like you could be in Ireland, and from certain angles it definitely looks like it...

(None of these photos are mine - I forgot to take any, so I've pinched all these from Google)

It was great to finally find out what the 'strange rockery thing' actually was, and it was lovely to see people enjoying it - it's a really interesting memorial. New York seems to 'do' memorials very well - which is great that they're all so different, but it's sad they have to have any in the first place.