On Friday morning, we were picked up from our two night stay at Ashford Castle by Maggie Dooney. Maggie and her partner Robbie run Little Gem Tours, the company we used for our time in Ireland.
Maggie was delightful and did a wonderful job escorting us in the last few days of our trip.
We left Ashford Castle and headed toward Westport in County Mayo. We spent the morning at Kylemore Abbey. We had the heaviest rain of our trip when we arrived, and while not a “desperate day”, we had some Florida-like rain for a bit.
the Abbey was constructed originally as Kylemore Castle in 1868. It took 100 men over a year to construct with 33 bedrooms, and 44,000 square feet. But only 4 bathrooms. Yikes! The castle was purchased by the Benedictine nuns in 1920 and was converted into an Abbey to house the nuns escaping bombing in Belgium during WWI. It is still active as an Abbey today. The Abbey had a school for girls for many years and the school finally closed just a couple of years ago.
The gothic church was a cool little sanctuary that the original owner built in honor of his wife after she died from dysentery while on a trip to the Nile. He built a “cathedral in miniature” for her final resting place
We enjoyed walking around the Abbey and the gothic church as well as the extensive walled gardens. The gardens went on for quite a ways and you could have spent hours there if you took time to look at everything. We didn’t. I’m not a big garden fan but these were pretty cool. Lots of different types of food plants and they originally had a number of glassed greenhouses where they grew tropical fruits. They had a monkey puzzle tree….we saw one in Norway last year; pretty cool. The flower in the hand is called fuschia.
From the Abbey, we headed on toward Westport and stopped at Croagh Patrick, locally referred to as “the Reek”. It is Ireland’s holy mountain and St Patrick is said to have spent 40 nights on it fasting and praying. It is the sight of an annual pilgrimage where people walk to the top (765 meters) on a very rough trail with jagged rocks. Barefoot.
I started the trek.
I didn’t get far.
Nearby we stopped at the National Famine Memorial. The memorial is a sculpture that commemorates the people who died in the great famine of 1845-1852. It is a sculpture of a “coffin ship” with skeleton bodies in the rigging. The ships were used to transport fleeing Irish people away from Ireland during the famine and many died on the overcrowded and unsanitary ships.
It looked a bit like a ship from pirates of the Caribbean with all the skeletons hanging off of it.
Our last stop before Westport was to stop by a statue of Grace O’Malley. Grace was a pirate queen in the 16th century who ruled the nearby seas. Interesting Tampa tie – there is a crewe of Grace O’Malley in Tampa that participates in the annual Gasparilla Pirate festival.
We got to Westport in time to settle in and swing by a well-known pub called Matt Malloys. They had some very good traditional Irish Music, perfect with a proper pint of Guinness
Tampaskis Travel 