Connemara – the rocky mountainous countryside of western County Galway – is almost entirely uncultivated, a strange wilderness of water and stone, peat bog, headlands and barren hills. Along its shores, the Atlantic eats savagely into the land, making spectacular inlets and bays. Seemingly uninhabitable, in pre-famine days Connemara was crowded with poverty-stricken farmers, victims of the Protestant Ascendancy that had driven them from their farms across the Shannon. Thousands of rough dry-stone walls criss-cross the bare hills, enclosing their tiny abandoned fields. The famine wiped out most of Connemara’s human life, and the memory of that disaster lingers sadly in the glorious landscape. The poignant scenery continues across Killary Fjord into County Mayo, where – as well as wide open spaces of bog, heath, mountain and lake – there are appealing small towns, a traditional way of life, and much to see.
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Set in the heart of Connemara, Minna is a proper country town with a shop, school, church and a handful of houses. If you head for the beach you will find idyllic, secluded coves perfect for some private sunbathing, well until the students from the Gaelteacht arrive.
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Museum chronicling life in Ireland from 1850 to 1950. Free entry. Exhibitions contain material from the Irish Folklife collection. Includes landlord's house with nineteenth century rooms, extensive planned gardens and exhibition galleries.
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