In the end we spent Saturday touring Connemara National Park, situated to the north and west of Galway proper. It’s an expansive region, and sparsely populated except by small outcroppings or individual houses stationed near the numerous lakes and rivers cutting into the region from the sea. In the spring and summer I imagine the mountains to be green and bright, but this time of year everything carried a brown pallor in conjunction with the overcast sky. It was cold here, being farther north, and the change was noticeable.
Ireland's only fjord, in the Connemara.
We stopped for lunch at a small pub along the route, famous for its appearance in the 1989 movie “The Field,” starring Richard Harris, a legacy the pub holds on to firmly. Afterwards we wound north to the main attraction of our journey, Kylemore Abbey, a large, right stone estate, both Benedictine Abbey and girl’s school. Now with just 25 students, there is talk of the estate being sold again. It started as a mansion in 1867, built by Mitchell Henry and sold to the Duke and Duchess of Manchester in 1903, only to be sold again, less than 20 years later, to the Benedictine Nuns who now own it.
It’s a massive stone structure, ornately decorated, sitting on the very edge of the lake and surrounded completely by the Connemara. It’s a wonder how Henry found the spot in the first place, it being fifty miles from Galway proper and lodged firmly between two very large groupings of mountains. It’s really a spectacular sight. Here we toured what bit of the mansion was accessible and then went down to the chapel and from there to the mausoleum, all the while taking a beautiful walk along the lake with the precipice of the mountainside towering over us on the left-hand side. It was the first time I got a real feel for the natural landscape of Ireland.
On Sunday we opted to go in the other direction- West. The Aran Islands are a group of three outlying rocks, some of the furthest most west pieces of land in Europe. An hour-long bus ride found us at the dock where we were ferried to Inis Mór, the largest of the islands, being about 12 miles square. There we rented bikes and toured it ourselves. Here you can see the bedrock that makes up not only these islands, but Ireland as a whole. Like much of Co. Claire, the island was lined with hundreds of rock-walled pastures spreading down to the shore. Here is where hundreds of year ago farmers hauled sand and seaweed up from the beach to line their paddocks, making them better for growing plants and pasturing animals. What remains are lopsided but sturdy walls and the rather frequent stone skeleton of a thatched-roof house. Animals are still kept here, cows and ponies, as well as a wealth of chickens and the occasional cat.
A friend we met on Inis Mór.
We went along the shore for a good hour and a half, just stopping at beaches and picking up rocks. The stone here is pocked and brittle and although the day was abnormally warm and clear, I can imagine the wet, cold sea the island must usually see. After awhile we wound up to the Seven Churches- a cropping of seven ruined churches on the hillside. Here was also a cemetery, and a very recent one at that, where people still came to mourn.
We took a wrong turn and ended up missing the second side of the island, instead biking right through the center and catching some wonderful vistas from the top. Late in the day we caught the ferry out, and then the bus back to Galway, but upon arriving in Galway we found out the last bus back to Cork had departed at 6:00pm, and that we had missed it by roughly an hour.
Out of ideas, we ate dinner at Supermac’s- a conglomeration of fast food that even America has yet to top- and spent the night in the comparative luxury of a Travelodge. Catching the 7:00am bus this morning, we finally stumbled into Cork at 11am, tired, smelly, and glad to be back.
Looking towards the beach at Inis Mór.
