🇮🇪 Ireland · West and North
Connemara is the wild west of Ireland in its purest form: a territory of blue-grey mountains, copper-coloured bogs, dark lakes and an endless coast of bays, white beaches and islets battered by the Atlantic. It is not a specific place you 'visit' in an hour but a whole region to travel slowly, where every bend in the road opens a new landscape. Oscar Wilde described it as 'a savage beauty', and anyone driving between the Twelve Bens and the sea understands why straight away.
Here is the most famous postcard of the Irish west — Kylemore Abbey reflected in its lake — but also the country's only fjord, the National Park with the accessible summit of Diamond Hill, the picturesque town of Clifden with its panoramic Sky Road, the coral sand beaches of Roundstone and the bogs where turf is still cut by hand. Connemara is also Gaeltacht: one of the regions where Irish remains an everyday language, heard in the pubs and taught in summer to students from all over the country.
This guide covers Connemara with a practical, warm eye: what to see and in what order, how to get around a region with no trains and limited buses (spoiler: a car is best), how much it costs to enter Kylemore, where to walk, where to eat fresh seafood and where to sleep. A corner of Ireland that combines overwhelming nature, a hard and luminous history, and the legendary hospitality of the west.
Connemara was for centuries the territory of the O'Flahertys, a Gaelic clan so feared that on the walls of Galway people prayed 'from the ferocious O'Flahertys, good Lord deliver us'. Poor, isolated land, it resisted anglicisation more than anywhere and kept the Irish language. The Great Famine (1845-1852) hit the region with extreme cruelty: the population collapsed through hunger and emigration, and the 'famine roads' were left as a scar, roads that lead nowhere, built as relief works to feed the starving. In 1868 the wealthy doctor Mitchell Henry raised Kylemore Castle out of love for his wife Margaret; today it is a Benedictine abbey. Nearby, at Letterfrack, an industrial school run by the Christian Brothers operated and became one of the darkest symbols of institutional abuse in Ireland. And on the bog at Derrygimlagh, beside the transatlantic radio station Marconi set up in 1907, Alcock and Brown landed in 1919 after the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Atlantic west and the north: Galway and its Fourteen Tribes, the Connemara of the famine roads and Kylemore, the Aran Islands as a refuge of the Irish language, the Cliffs of Moher above the karst of the Burren, and the Giant's Causeway, in Northern Ireland (United Kingdom), with its geology and the plantation of Ulster.
Read the history of West and North →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
On one of the gates of Galway's medieval wall, tradition says, the city's English merchants carved a prayer: 'From the ferocious O'Flahertys, good Lord deliver us.' On the other side of that wall, beyond Lough Corrib, Connemara began: a territory of mountains, bogs and a labyrinthine coast that for centuries was the domain of the O'Flahertys (Ó Flaithbheartaigh), one of the great Gaelic dynasties of the west of Ireland. From their stronghold at Aughnanure, near Oughterard, they controlled these lands from the mid-thirteenth century, feared for their independence and their resistance to any outside power.
The name Connemara — Conmhaicne Mara in Irish, 'the descendants of Conmhac by the sea' — refers to an ancient people who lived on the coast. It was poor land, thin soil over rock and turf, lashed by the Atlantic, and it was precisely that poverty and that isolation that kept it apart from the anglicisation transforming the rest of the island. Here the Irish language, the customs and the Gaelic clan organisation survived far longer than in the eastern lowlands.
That world was broken by the English conquest. After the wars of the seventeenth century and the Cromwellian confiscations of the middle of that century, the O'Flahertys lost much of their land, which passed to new owners, among them the Martin family, one of the 'tribes of Galway'. The Martins would come to own one of the largest estates in the British Isles, and one of them, Richard Martin, went down in history as 'Humanity Dick', a pioneer of legislation against cruelty to animals in the early nineteenth century. But beneath the great landlords there still lived, in ever more precarious conditions, a Gaelic peasant population that depended almost entirely on a single crop: the potato.
No region of Ireland suffered the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór, 1845-1852) more harshly than Connemara. When potato blight ruined harvest after harvest from 1845, the rural population — who lived almost entirely on that tuber grown on small plots of poor land — was left on the edge of starvation. In a land with no industry, hardly any other food and cut off from the main centres, hunger, typhus and dysentery took a terrible toll, and mass emigration and death emptied whole villages.
The British government responded above all with the so-called public works: instead of giving food free, a miserable daily wage was paid to the starving to carry out labour, on the liberal principle of not 'encouraging dependency'. So the notorious 'famine roads' were born: roads, walls and paths built by famished people, many of which led nowhere useful — they ended in the middle of a bog, climbed a hillside to no destination or skirted a lake for no reason. Their only purpose was to give an excuse for paying a subsistence wage. Weakened men, women and children died breaking stone in the rain for a few pence or a ration.
In Connemara you can still see those roads and walls trailing off into the landscape, silent scars of the catastrophe. The region, which before the famine was densely populated with small tenants, was left depopulated; many of its people died and as many emigrated to the United States, Canada or Britain. The memory of that tragedy, and of the mixture of ideological indifference and disastrous management that made it worse, is still very present in the identity of the Irish west.
A few years after the famine, in a valley on the shore of Pollacapall Lough, the building that is now the very image of Connemara was raised. In 1867-1871, Mitchell Henry — an English doctor and politician from a family enriched by the Manchester textile industry — had Kylemore Castle built as a home and a gift for his wife Margaret, having both fallen in love with the place on their honeymoon years earlier. The result was a lavish neo-Gothic mansion of granite and limestone, with more than seventy rooms, heating and water systems advanced for the time, glasshouses, a model walled garden and even a small neo-Gothic church.
The happiness did not last. Margaret died in 1874, in her early forties, after catching a fever on a trip to Egypt. Mitchell Henry, devastated, had the delicate miniature cathedral-church built in her memory along with a mausoleum where they both rest. Over the years and with financial difficulties, the property was sold; it passed briefly through a duke's hands and, finally, in 1920, was bought by a community of Benedictine nuns.
They were the 'Irish Dames of Ypres': a Benedictine community of Irish origin founded on the continent in the seventeenth century, whose monastery in Ypres (Belgium) had been destroyed by the bombardments of the First World War. Sheltering first in England, the nuns settled at Kylemore in December 1920 and rebuilt their life there: they turned the castle into an abbey and opened a girls' boarding school that came to have an international reputation, with pupils from Ireland, Europe, Asia and the United States as well as local girls. The school ran for almost a century, until it closed in 2010. Today the Benedictine community still lives at Kylemore and runs the site, which has become one of the most visited attractions in the west of Ireland.
A few kilometres from Kylemore, the same isolation that made Connemara a refuge of wild beauty also had a terrible reverse side. In the village of Letterfrack, between 1887 and 1974, St Joseph's Industrial School operated, an industrial school for boys run by the congregation of the Christian Brothers. Some 2,819 boys passed through its classrooms and workshops over almost ninety years, many of them sent there because of poverty, orphanhood or petty crime.
The report of the Ryan Commission (2009), which spent a decade investigating abuse in Ireland's institutions for children, described what happened at Letterfrack in devastating terms. It concluded that physical punishment was 'severe, excessive and pervasive', that it 'created a climate of fear' and that it was the main method of control; and that sexual abuse of the boys by some brothers had been a 'chronic' problem. The report itself noted that Letterfrack's remote location, in the heart of Connemara, made the situation worse: the isolation allowed abusers to operate over long periods while escaping detection and punishment.
Many of those boys died at the institution and were buried there; their stories, silenced for decades, came to light thanks to survivors such as the writer and politician Mannix Flynn and to official investigations. Today the old school building houses an education centre and a memorial remembers the children who died. It is an uncomfortable but necessary part of Connemara's history: that of the institutional abuse that marked twentieth-century Ireland, and which should neither be glossed over nor confused with the very different history of Kylemore Abbey.
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the desolate bog of Derrygimlagh, south of Clifden, surprisingly became a place of world technological cutting edge. In 1905-1907, the Italian pioneer Guglielmo Marconi chose this empty, flat land to set up a gigantic wireless telegraphy station, the Marconi Transatlantic Wireless Station, which in 1907 launched the first regular commercial radiotelegraph service across the Atlantic, linking Europe and North America commercially for the first time. The station was enormous for its day: with its masts, generators fuelled by the bog's own turf and hundreds of workers, it transformed the local economy for a few years. It operated until it was damaged during the Irish Civil War, in 1922, and was later dismantled.
Beside that station, a decisive chapter in the history of aviation was also written. On 15 June 1919, two British aviators, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown, completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight in history. They had taken off the day before from Newfoundland (Canada) in a converted Vickers Vimy bomber and, after nearly sixteen and a half hours in the air facing fog, ice and mechanical failures over the ocean, they sighted the masts of Marconi's station. Believing they were landing on firm meadow, they came down on the Derrygimlagh bog; the aircraft buried its nose in the mud, but both men were unhurt.
The feat won them a 10,000 pound prize from the Daily Mail and a knighthood from King George V a few days later. A monument shaped like an aircraft tail fin, on a nearby hill, and a marker at the exact landing site now recall that achievement, and a loop path across the bog — the Derrygimlagh Loop — links both stories: that of the radio and that of the flight that shrank the ocean.
Despite the famine, emigration and depopulation, Connemara kept something almost all the rest of Ireland lost: its language. The region is one of the country's main Gaeltacht areas, the places where Irish (gaeilge) is still the everyday language of the community. In villages such as An Cheathrú Rua (Carraroe), Ros Muc or Cill Chiaráin, life is lived in Irish: it is spoken at home, at school, in the pub and on the signs; every summer thousands of students from all over Ireland come to the immersion colleges to learn it, and Raidió na Gaeltachta, the Irish-language radio station, broadcasts from Casla.
This attachment to language and tradition made Connemara a symbol of the Gaelic cultural revival. The revolutionary leader Patrick Pearse, one of the figures of the 1916 Easter Rising, had a country cottage here, at Ros Muc, where he soaked up living Irish and popular culture; today it is an interpretation centre. Music, poetry and 'sean-nós' (traditional unaccompanied singing) are still part of the region's pulse.
Contemporary Connemara lives mainly on tourism, hill farming (the famous Connemara lamb, with protected designation), fishing, mussel and oyster aquaculture in Killary fjord, and the breeding of the celebrated Connemara pony, a hardy, elegant native breed shown every August at the Clifden fair. The same landscapes that were the setting for so much hardship are today one of the great draws of the Wild Atlantic Way, the coastal route of the west. Connemara remains, as Oscar Wilde wrote, a place of 'savage beauty': a corner where nature, language and a dense and sometimes painful history live side by side in plain sight of anyone who knows how to look.