Connemara

As we drove west from Galway city into a smeary red sunset, my daughters caught sight of the Twelve Bens standing like dark guards in peaked helmets along the lake-streaked boglands. There was a communal intake of breath – the kind of admiring gasp I remembered giving when I had first set eyes on Connemara’s sentinel mountains a dozen years before.

‘Oh my God,’ 18-year-old Elizabeth sighed, ‘look at those beautiful reflections in the lakes!’ Her boyfriend Pip (21) and 14-year-old sister Mary murmured appreciatively, too, as they gazed out on one of Ireland’s most stunning landscapes. In the front seat of the hire car Jane and I exchanged silent glances of relief. Yes – it was probably going to be all right, after all, taking three city-raised young people on a family holiday to a remote rural location in the west of Ireland.

The potential problems of taking teenagers and young adults away on a family holiday are all too clear. What if they react with contempt to the place you’ve so carefully chosen? What if they refuse point-blank to do the things that you want to do? What if they throw a Kevin-the-Teenager sulk and can’t be cajoled out of it? How are they going to get any night-time action? And, most brow-furrowingly problematical of all – how on earth is the dreaded Boredom to be staved off?

One thing I knew for certain; I must rein back on my own enthusiasm for the west of Ireland. No-one else in our party had yet been to Connemara, and the surest way to put them right off the place would be to over-enthuse. No – they must discover the magic of Connemara for themselves.

Way down a twisting side lane south of Clifden we came to Ballyconneely Holiday Cottages in the townland of Bunowen More. It was too dark to see anything much that first night. But next morning the full majesty of the view from our conservatory windows was revealed – reed-fringed Doon Lough right on our doorstep, the tall hump of Doon Hill beside it, the ruins of the Gothic mansion of Bunowen Castle dramatically silhouetted beyond, and in the distance the gold and blue peaks of the Twelve Bens outlined against a clear Sunday sky. ‘Fabulous view,’ said Pip, sketching away on the conservatory table.

No-one wanted to accompany me on the five-mile round walk to church in Ballyconneely. Strange, that. It was one of those fresh, breezy west of Ireland mornings. Connemara ponies put their noses over the stone walls, and a sweet tang of turf smoke drifted on the wind. The bogland rose and fell in gentle swells, scabbed with granite outcrops and spattered with the bright yellows and purples of bell heather, thyme and gorse.

In rural Ireland houses belong to townlands rather than to nucleated villages, and are widely scattered over the landscape. Ballyconneely village itself turned out to be little more than a crossroads with a pub and store (‘Yes! It’s Keogh’s Bar!’ proclaimed the sign painted on the end gable), the focus of all local shopping and social life, which we’d come to know well during our week’s holiday. The church was rammed to the doors with at least two hundred people. The priest’s exhortation to perseverance and steadfastness, and his warm welcome to strangers like myself in the congregation, were delivered in the ripest of Galway country accents.

The ragged-edged peninsula where Bunowen More sits is scalloped with the most wonderful beaches of white sand. As always seems to happen on seaside holidays, we soon chose and adopted ‘our beach’ just below Connemara Golf Club. Early each morning, while the young people were still snoring, Jane and I would swim there with only a herd of seaweed-munching cattle for company.

What you do in western Connemara depends very much on the weather – and there’s plenty of that, out here where the Atlantic winds first meet the land. Weather fronts are forever marching through, one behind the other, shrouding the mountains and then unveiling them, sending cloud shadows and rainstorms chasing across the countryside. That first hot afternoon we all swam in unbelievably clean, clear sea under a cloudless sky. ‘We could be in the Caribbean,’ said Jane, and it really felt that way.

Within a few hours, though, the weather had turned, so that the following morning blew chill and grey. Elizabeth declared a reading day for herself and took to her bed incommunicado. The rest of us sauntered down the lane in spits of rain to Bunowen Pier and Ballyconneely Smokehouse, where we bought marinated gravadlax and picked up lemon-yellow shells on the shore. The sea was beginning to gleam again as we ate the gravadlax for lunch, and by mid-afternoon Bunowen More was back to hot sun with the Twelve Bens cut hard and gold against blue sky.

The west of Ireland and traditional music go together like bacon and cabbage. I’d brought along my melodeon and a clutch of harmonicas in hopes of a tune or two. I knew Pip was a bit of a wizard on the guitar, and had high hopes of finding a session in a local pub where we could join in. That didn’t happen, as it turned out: amplified ballads for holidaymakers are more the style in western Galway, it seems. But we had a good few sessions of our own in the cottage anyway, hammering away at everything from jigs and reels to blues and jingly-jangly stuff.

The home-made music was just one aspect of the DIY fun we made amongst ourselves. It started out as a case of faute de mieux – the nearest town, Clifden, was eight miles off and two streets wide, and its local pubs and small disco had only limited appeal for our young city slickers. But they proved very resourceful at amusing themselves. The cottage had a big telly, but it was rarely switched on. Instead there were bouts of joke-telling and singing, games of ‘sh’ead’ (a card game that dares not speak its name), texting friends, drawing and painting the scenery, and epic, clattering tournaments of Mah-Jong on the glass-topped conservatory table.

Not that we just hung around the house and the beach. On one day we hooked up with the Clifden field archaeologist Michael Gibbons, an old friend of mine, and went walking in the Twelve Bens – an exhilarating, tiring day of steep slopes and immense views over mountains, sea and islands. Another local chum, bodhrán-maker Malachy Kearns of Roundstone, gave us a great welcome, popping open a bottle of bubbly and showing us over the workshop where his world-famous round Irish drums are fashioned from beechwood and goatskin. And when Mary decided in her turn to spend a day glooming behind a book, Jane and I took Pip and Elizabeth off to stroll in the superbly restored walled garden at Kylemore Abbey.

We introduced the youngsters to proper Irish Guinness – ‘Mmmm,’ was Elizabeth’s verdict, ‘it really is so much nicer than the stuff you get in England’ – and we went to an Irish Night in Roundstone Community Hall, where a band of dancers and musicians whose ages spanned seventy years played heavenly tunes and danced like dervishes with the devil at their heels. Nothing we did was particularly fine-feathered or sophisticated, but the subtle spell of Connemara was well and truly woven over each of us by the week’s end.

On our last night we had a Mah-Jong and music marathon in the Bunowen cottage. Pip had a go on the melodeon, Elizabeth finished her picture of the Twelve Bens, and Mary laughed so immoderately she did the nose trick with her mug of tea. Connemara magic, pure and simple.

INFORMATION

Travel:

Ryanair (0871-246-0000; www.ryanair.com) fly to Dublin from 16 UK airports, to Knock from London Stansted, and to Shannon from London Stansted and Glasgow.

Aer Arann (0800-587-2324; www.aerarann.ie) fly from Dublin to Galway.

Murrays Europcar (UK: 0870-607-5000; Ireland: 01-614-2800; www.europcar.com) rent cars at Dublin, Galway, Knock and Shannon airports.

From Dublin airport: M1, M50 to Jct 7; N4, N6 to Galway City; N59 to Clifden, R341 to Ballyconneely.

Maps:

OS of Ireland 1:50,000 Discovery Series 44 and 37

‘Connemara’ (Folding Landscapes, Roundstone, Co. Galway – tel 095-35886): widely available locally.

Accommodation

Erriseask House Hotel, Ballyconneely, Connemara (tel 00-353-95-23553; fax 23639; info@erriseask.com) – neat, friendly, family-run hotel. Dble B&B from £32 p.p.; with dinner, from £48 p.p.

Ballyconneely Holiday Homes, Ballyconneely, Connemara (tel: Trident Holiday Homes on 00-353-1-668-3534; fax 660-6465; fdillon@tridentholidayhomes.ie, www.dublinshortlets.com or www.thh.ie) – £200-£510 a week, depending on season.

Connemara National Park Centre, Letterfrack – tel 095-41054/41006

Kylemore Abbey Garden (095-41146; www.kylemoreabbey.ie) - £7 adults, £4 concessions.

Roundstone Musical Instruments, Roundstone, Connemara – tel 095-35875; www.bodhran.com.

Connemara Walking Centre (Michael Gibbons), Island House, Market Street, Clifden (tel 095-21379; www.walkingireland.com) – guided walks from £20 per person.

Connemara Smokehouse, Bunowen Pier, Aillebrack, Ballyconneely (tel 095-23739; fax 23001; www.smokehouse.ie)

Clifden Tourist Information Centre, Galway Road, Clifden (tel 095-21163; www.irelandwest.ie)

Tourism Ireland, 103 Wigmore Street, London W1U 1QS (tel 080-039-7000; www.tourismireland.com)