Slane Farm Hostel

We booked in for the weekend of the Slane concert, 25 EUR per person for two nights. Good value and a good plan of action as my abiding memory of going to a concert at Slane Castle was the endless amount of walking from car parks /​bus parks to the venue. And then the huge amount of time spent sitting in traffic trying to leave. It’s a great venue, but I have avoided it in the past because of how difficult it is to get to and from there.
Slane Farm Hostel was 300 metres from the Slane Castle grounds if the information they provided was to be believed. I took this with a pinch of salt, but it had to be better than arriving and leaving on the day, right? It ended up being just over 1 KM away for a finish (from camp to the gate we were allowed to enter by). Still, it was better than previous experiences.
I don’t know why I thought camping for the Foo Fighters concert was going to be anything other than a regular festival camping experience. There was plenty of screaming and shouting, which is fine (ear plugs). Other festival camping effects that I wont go into. But hey, SFH can’t control people being idiots. And I need to finally accept I’ve grown out of camping at concerts :)
The first camping field did seem to me to be too full by the time they opened the second field. I’m sure the staff controlling this tried to get people to park and pitch sensibly and I can imagine it’s like herding cats. Our plans to depart at a reasonable hour on Sunday morning looked scuppered. But we managed to leave before 10 am in the end, which was great.
At the moment I’m not sure I can recommend this as an alternative to going to and from Slane Castle for concerts on the day itself. Catch 22.
All that said the staff we dealt with directly seemed nice enough. And I saw who looked like the owner dealing with an issue with the toilets down by the yards on Saturday morning — it was good to see they cared about that. And the toilets down by the yard always had loo roll.
If an opportunity to camp here at any other time of the year came up, I would go back to Slane Farm Hostel as their facilities seemed fine.

We flew into Dublin from Boston to arrive here at 4:30am local time. By 10am local, we had been up perhaps all but 2 of the prior 26 hours, and had had only 4 hours of sleep before that, so the narrowness of Irish roads … was becoming more and more of surreal descent into madness for us. We opened up our Lonely Planet guide, then, and found out about this place, which really is quite colorful and charming, with a beautiful hill covered with gorse and grass and shadows of clouds across the way, where the smell of cows, when you are very very tired, can be forgiven.
Once we got here, though, we could get into the lobby, ring the bell, and… not find anyone except the very nice little dog and the gentleman who mows the lawn, who didn’t even know his employers’ number.
After some very worried waiting, knowing we didn’t have any more driving in us and concerned that there wouldn’t be anyone there to help us at ten in the morning, a nice young man with cow-​mucky wellies came by and gave us a key, telling us his mother or sister would charge us later because he didn’t know how much the rooms cost. Fine by us. We collapsed into a bed with more sag in it than — hm. Not really many metaphors come to mind for that except for off-​color ones, so I’ll leave it as: we collapsed into an objectively terrible but subjectively marvelous bed and fell into what can only be described as the shortest coma in history. That’s okay, too; if Lonely Planet is to be believed, this is one of the more reasonable places to stay around here, which has its own value.
We are exceptionally grateful for having been let in so early in the day.
Now that we’re up, there are a lot of sites of historic significance around here — Tara and Newgrange are the ones I know best from my past as a precocious teenager studying Irish prehistory in the CTYI programme at DCU, but the site of the Battle of the Boyne is also near, as is Monasterboice (which is beautiful in a way similar to the ruins of Glendalough in Wicklow, but without quite as lovely a natural setting). There are also some forest preserves nearby that we hope to investigate on the way north to Belfast tomorrow.