Wednesday April 27th: Kylemore Abbey and Maumturk Mountains, Ireland
Bob: We had seen Kylemore Abbey from the road as we drove by on the N59 and our landlady had told us a little of its history, so we wanted to see it "up close and personal", so to speak. After breakfast we drove out to N59, turned left in the direction of Leenane, and arrived shortly thereafter. Monika and Lois wanted to visit the gift shop first, so we stopped there. Surprisingly, I found some coasters with the O'Callaghan family crest on them and an Ordnance Survey Map of the western part of Ireland. Those maps are on a fairly detailed 1:250,000 scale and have topographic information, so I highly recommend them for driving on the back roads of Ireland. |
Monika: We had heard that one of the main attractions of the area was Kylemore Abbey, and the best time to visit was right after it opened at 10 a.m. before the buses from Galway arrived. So off we went. Kylemore Abbey is an impressive stone structure built into the side of a mountain. It did not start out as an abbey, but as a 19th century manor house, built by a rich gentleman who had honeymooned in the area and fallen in love with the area of the Connemaras. After his father died and he inherited the wealth, he bought the land and built the estate. |
Bob: The Abbey, as it turned out, had a rather tumultuous history. Henry, who constructed it, essentially spent a fortune acquiring thousands of acres and building the huge stone manor house for his young wife. Although built in a Gothic revival style complete with stained glass windows, it had all the latest innovations including electric lighting and running water throughout the house. Henry also established a model farm on a section of the estate where he tried out innovations such as crop rotation and different crops. All this cost money, of course, and our guide said that he was spending 40,000 pounds a year maintaining the place with an income of only 900 pounds a year from the rents and revenues. Henry's wife died of dysentery in Egypt in 1874 only three years after completion of the edifice, so her enjoyment of it was short-lived. Still Henry continued on with his eldest daughter as chatelaine until old age and running out of money induced him to sell it to the Duke and Duchess of Manchester in 1904. The Manchesters were quite a pair. The Duke was a gambling rakehell and the Duchess was a social-climbing heiress from Ohio. They ripped out the Gothic interior of the entrance hallway including the stained glass and replaced it with something I would call "English hunting lodge"--dark wood paneling, plain glass windows, etc. The Duchess specifically had the large stained glass windows destroyed although the workers implored her to either store them or give them away. When the Duke finally gambled it all away, creditors foreclosed on the property and the Duchess divorced him. |
Monika: By all accounts, Mitchell Henry did a lot of good with his estate. He employed local labor and treated them well. He and his family then lived in the area for over 30 years although his wife died after having lived on the estate for only three years. She left 8 children, the oldest 19 who took over the running of the estate and the youngest only two. Mitchell Henry built a beautiful Gothic church to his wife's memory. We were in time for a tour of the abbey and found out all about the Henrys and the rest of the history. After the Henrys the Duke of Manchester and his wife bought the estate. He was an impoverished aristocrat, who loved to gamble, and she was a rich American heiress. She got a title and he got money to gamble...a marriage made in heaven (or not). After a few years Daddy no longer wanted to pay for the upkeep of the manor house (plus his son-in-law's gambling) so the estate was sold and somewhat neglected. But by 1918 the Benedictine nuns from Ypres, whose abbey was bombed during WWI and who had an Irish heritage, managed to find a sponsor to help them acquire the mansion and the grounds. Thus Kylemore became an Abbey. The nuns also ran a boarding school for girls until a few years ago. Now the house and the grounds have become a tourist attraction and admission fees help defray the cost of running it. |
Bob: Thereupon the property languished in the hands of caretakers for a few years until the Sisters took it over in the 1920's (I think) and created a boarding school for young women that lasted until just last year. We could only tour the front 4 or 5 rooms as the remaining sisters are still in residence in the back part of the house, but those were quite interesting. The things remaining from the Henrys such as the wonderful carved and inlaid marble fireplaces, were absolutely exquisite. The parts renovated by the Manchesters were dark, dull, and plain. Quite a contrast. |
Monika: The house was rather beautiful. One story was, that the Henrys had a beautiful stained glass window in the front hall. The Duchess of Manchester did not like it and had it destroyed --- you can see why my sympathies are not with the Manchesters! |
Bob: From the manor house we walked along the little lake to the small Gothic chapel which Henry had built as a memorial to his wife. The columns at the side of the chapel had pillars of Irish marble from different areas and in the different colors: green, black, and red. The embellishments on the Gothic arches were quite ornate and in keeping with what we had seen from churches in the 12th century. I was amused that the chapel quite literally had bats in the belfry, or at least in the roof area. As it was the largest colony of such bats in Ireland, it had been carefully protected during the restoration work in the 1990s and the bats were apparently still there. |
Monika: From the house, we walked 100 meters to the church. It was a beautiful little Gothic church. What I found especially intriguing was that inside the columns were made up out of columns of the three types of marbles from Ireland, the green from Connemara, red from Cork, and black from Galway. And I was glad that we had been to the marble place, so that I was aware of this fact. The church also had a beautiful stained glass window, that thankfully the Duchess of Manchester left alone. |
Bob: Our final stop at the Abbey was a large, walled, Victorian-era garden about 1 mile distant from the manor house. There were actually two sections to the gardens, but the main showpiece was a really large and meticulously landscaped section of formal gardens. It was far more open than I had expected, with carefully shaped sections of flower beds set in a regular pattern amid the lush green of an absolutely perfect lawn. The basic green carpet of the lawn set off the vivid colors of the flower beds very effectively, I thought. |
Monika: After we had seen the church, we took the shuttle bus to the Victorian Gardens that were about a mile from the house, probably because that was the next wide spot between the lake and the mountain. The walled Victorian gardens were being restored to their original splendor and it was intriguing to see the amount of symmetry that was being used. |
Bob: In Henry's time the gardens had included a truly huge expanse of greenhouses in which such exotic fruits as bananas had been grown. Only two greenhouses had been reconstructed when we visited, but they were of a modern construction rather than the delicate, graceful white ironwork that I would expect in a Victorian greenhouse. At the far corner was housing for the workers and the head gardener, and what a contrast in lifestyles that was! The worker-bee housing was cramped, rough, plain, and simple, whereas the housing of the head gardener was quite genteel, verging on luxurious. |
Monika: At the edge of the house were the greenhouses and vinery (a greenhouse were grapevines climbed right up the windows). Next to that a boothy - a house for the under gardeners. It was small with a living room, bedroom, and loft. Six under gardeners lived here. |
Bob: Gardening was taken seriously by the Victorians and apparently head gardeners were recruited, paid, and housed as professionals. |
Monika: Next to it was the house of the head gardeners who must have held a distinguished position since the house was quite large with lots of room. |
Bob: The final section of the gardens was the herb and vegetable section and although it was designed to really produce food, it was still quite pretty. The one obvious and slightly amusing concession to Victorian sensibilities was a herbaceous hedge that lined the main walkway on both sides. This hedge had flower beds at the base backed by high hedges of boxwood that preventing the ladies walking along the path from seeing any of the mundane plants of the vegetable gardens or the common gardeners working in them! |
Monika: Further on were the vegetable gardens because the Abbey, as had been the mansion before it, was largely self-sufficient as far as vegetables were concerned. They grew everything they needed. No wonder the position of head gardener was such an important one. Between the upper and the lower gardens were the herbaceous hedges. Two tall boxwood hedges with flowers in front of them lined a walk. Here the ladies could walk, without being disturbed by the unsightly view of a vegetable, or worse, an under gardener tending those vegetables. Ahhh, one has to love those Victorian ladies. |
Bob: From the Abbey we essayed to take a loop drive back into the mountains. The landscape changed very rapidly as we worked back through a sequence of narrow roads into the mountains. The mountains were particularly scenic when we found a lough or small lake at their base. But there was only one basic ridge of mountains. so after we had gone through a gap and reached the other side, the land was suddenly and surprisingly flat--no foothills as I would have expected from our experiences in the mountainous areas back in the U.S. There were, however, very pretty mountain lakes or "loughs" all along our route. We saw the remains of a tower fort out one small island in the middle of a lough, so we took a picture of that and only later found out that it had belonged to the husband of Granny O'Malley, the famous female pirate at the time of Queen Elizabeth I. She had defended it against rival chieftains who had ambushed and assassinated her husband, just one part of her colorful career. |
Monika: Bob and I decided to walk the mile back to the entrance from the gardens, while Lois was contented to wait for the bus. It was a nice walk along a little lake, in which we could see the mirror images of the mountain we ALMOST climbed the day before - we decided to name it Mount Nemesis. We all reached the entrance about the same time. For the second half of the day, we decided a driving tour through the Joyce region. This would get us to the upper end of Lough Corrib and then the lower end of Lough Mask. We thought we would be able to have lunch somewhere along the drive. First we drove back along the fjord to Leenane and then on between two mountain ranges to Lough Corrib. There we stopped for pictures, especially of some ruins of a castle on an island in the middle of the lake. But no open restaurant. |
Bob: I continued on looking for lunch. The first town was a complete bust, but we continued on through rugged, beautiful scenery until we found a town with an open bar/restaurant. There we had a nice, relaxed meal, and chatted with our server, a teenager. It was curious that we had crossed the Atlantic to see this beautiful piece of rural Ireland, which he was oblivious to, and he just wanted to go to Southern California, which we have no yen to see again at all. He also spoke of Galway as the "Big City" in much the same awestruck tones as some people in the U.S. speak of New York city. |
Monika: So on we went to the next little town. We stopped at a restaurant, but they only seemed to have full meals. But along the street, we saw a little pub. There we found a nice table next to the windows and good food including, of course, a pint of Smithwick. |
Bob: By the time we had finished our meal it was getting late, so we decided not to take a further road loop to the North. Instead we trundled along beside a very pretty loch, but then missed a critical turnoff and started getting into some really out-of-the-way places. The road was so narrow and overgrown on both sides that I was very glad that no one else was one the road. That is, there were no cars but there was some Irish boyo on a Honda All Terrain Vehicle who roared up behind me--I was crawling along honking as we went around all the blind corners and hills. I finally was induced to pray at one point when the only way forward was across an old, narrow, crumbling bridge. It was placarded for no more than 3 tons, and even that seemed generous because I don't mean it was just a LITTLE crumbling, I mean that the concrete railings on each side had crumbled to pieces and fallen into the river below. The concrete surface had also basically crumbled back into gravel and was very uneven, not to say shaky-looking. Clearly the gravel had no more structural strength and I wasn't at all sure about what was beneath that layer of loose gravel if anything, so I prayed to the Bridge God that the bridge wouldn't collapse while we were on it. Then I slowly, carefully, gingerly eased our small, light car over that surface to the other side. Relieved that the Bridge God had granted us safe passage, we retraced our route back through the gap in the Connemara Mountains to Leenane and thence back home along the southern shore of the fjord. |
Monika: After this nice lunch, we started chatting in the car, and I missed our next turn-off. So, instead of going across a bridge, we went up one side of a bay of Lough Mask and down the other, with the road going down to one lane with grass in the middle, and the inevitable sheep on the side. At one point, a lamb was actually asleep in the middle of the road. But the views were great and we stopped several times for photographic opportunities. But before we joined the major road, we had to cross a wreck of a bridge - the only one worse, was one near Canberra that I made Bob cross at least twice. On this bridge, Bob went as slow as he could and started to pray to the Gods of the Bridges. All went well, and we joined the road that led us back across the mountains into civilization. The mountains here were not that high and covered with green grass - and sheep, of course. |
Bob: We did take a different route back to Tully Cross, however, by taking a "shortcut" road that curved out and around the shore of the small peninsula on which our B&B was located. Once we reached Tully Cross, we turned right and just a kilometer or so later arrived at our B&B on the outskirts of Tully (if one can talk about "outskirts" when the town has one street and 5 houses!). It had been a full, fun day and we were happy to put up our feet for our last night at the Sunnymeade B&B and work on that jigsaw puzzle of the Aran Islands which we finally completed! We particularly enjoyed the peat fire that our hosts lit for us each evening. I will mention, though, that keeping a peat fire burning is quite different than a fire fed by solid wood such as the campfires Monika and I are used to. A peat fire needs to be built up more frequently and you can't let it burn down too far or you just get smoky embers. By the third night, though, I was getting the hang of it and the smell, to be sure, was wonderful. |
Monika: Back close to the Renvyle peninsula, we decided to take the coast road back to the B&B rather than the main road. It was another pretty drive. We were surprised to see two kids playing in the water of one of the little lakes with the parents in a boat next to them - phototime, of course. When we arrived at the B&B there were more scones waiting for us. We finally managed to finish the puzzle. I was for leaving it, but Bob wanted to take it home with us, so we packed it carefully, leaving it mainly together |
| Index |
| Prolog | Map of Transatlantic Cruise | Map of Drive in Ireland | Epilog |
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