Day 5: Connemara
For birders, there is excitement in the form of offshore diving gannets and oystercatchersized red jackdaws.
Galway Bay, halfway down Ireland’s western seaboard, beckons by way of national highways whose new sections are a motoring breeze, so smooth and roomy. Like many parts of Ireland, Galway enjoys a fabled Celtic history. Galway City is on our itinerary because we are invited to stay with a Dunedinborn and educated marine scientist, Prof Peter Croot, and his Chileanborn wife, Gilda. Peter is head of marine science at the National University of Ireland. The city lies at the head Galway Bay, a muchstudied inlet over 60km long, the outer reaches of which are conveniently guarded by a row of islets, the Aran Islands. The North Atlantic Current moderates Galway’s climate. Without such a warm current, Galway would be much colder because it lies in latitude 53deg north. In the New Zealand region, latitude 53deg is to the south of subantarctic Campbell Island, the Furious Fifties.
Our hosts live a stone’s throw from a gravel shore on Connemara Peninsula and they want to show us more of their region. The rugged Galway Bay shoreline is a maze of inlets and estuaries as well as unusual coral sand beaches that from a distance resemble the more common creamy quartz sand of Otago beaches. Known as marl beaches, they comprise tiny white and golden coral (calcium carbonate) chips mixed with shell fragments from sea urchins and limpets.
Highlights of sightseeing on the peninsula include the shortlegged Connemara ponies grazing a roadside paddock fenced by drystone walls, and a spectacular lakeside stone castle called Kylemore, built in 1868, that is now the abbey and home of a community of Benedictine nuns. Castles are not as plentiful in Ireland as they are in England and Scotland so Kylemore, near the village of Letterfrack, an hour’s drive from Galway City, attracts many visitors, including Galwegians.