Connemara and Cong: Part 2

I was way too tired last night to finish the blog entry that I had started, so here is part 2 of last Saturday!

Following Ashford Castle and Cong town center, we headed over to the undeveloped lands of Connemara.

This picture is typical of the landscape in Connemara. This specific lake is called Lough Nafooey. I don't remember anything amazingly special about this lake other than the fact that it has a fun name.


If you look high up on the mountains, there are little white specks. Those are actually sheep that climbed all the way to the tops of the mountains. These are mountain sheep, and they have long, curly horns on their heads.



These are just two pretty pictures of the beautiful landscape in Connemara. Actually, these mountains used to be covered in trees, but all of the logging for houses, firewood, etc. has made the mountains rather barren, and it is very difficult to grow crops in these areas. This is why there are so many sheep. The sheep are the farmers' primary source of income in this area. One of the only crops that can grow in this soil is potatoes so this area was particularly impacted by the Great Potato Famine in the 1840s.


If you can see the grid-like appearance of the land, it is all made of stone walls. These walls mark the boundaries of different pastures belonging to different farmers. The building of stone walls is a kind of an art around here, as they are not held together by anything. They are simply stacked rocks. In fact, there are no gates to get through either. If a farmer (and his sheepdog) want to get into one of these pastures, there were frequently steps made out of the strategic placement of longer stones. These stones jutted out of the stone wall, making a kind of staircase. If the farmer needs to move the sheep, he just knocks a section of the wall down and rebuilds it after the sheep have moved.


Here is a closer look at the wall. It is not obvious in this picture, but in many of the walls, the farmers leave holes which are about the size of a football. These holes serve two purposes. One is to let the air through on a windy day. If the air does not have enough room to travel through, the walls will collapse. The second reason is to let the leprechauns and fairies pass through!


There are sheep everywhere in Connemara! As I mentioned in the last post, there are WAY more sheep than people in Ireland. Here, we encountered a roadblock of sheep.


Luckily the farmer and his dog were not far behind. We were able to see this dog round up the sheep for the farmer and get them safely on the side of the road. Sheepdogs are such smart dogs!



This is Jack the Lad. Apparently he is friends with the bus tour guides. Every time they go by, they stop and feed Jack the Lad some carrots. In fact, he even knows the sound of the bus horn. When they beeped, he came running up to the fence for his carrots! Jack is a Connemara Pony. This is a specific breed of pony indigenous to the Connemara area. Connemara ponies are a mix of the ponies that the Vikings initially brought to Ireland and the horses from the ships of the Spanish Armada which landed in Ireland for safety during a war in 1588. The breeding of these two breeds (as well as some possible other breeds) created the Connemara Pony.

These ponies are supposed to be very docile and good-natured ponies, however Jack the Lad is a special case. He is a bit fiesty, and gave me a playful nip on the arm while I was petting him.


After visiting Jack the Lad, we did a bit more traveling around. I just have to show you this picture. I just thought it was the most charming little cottage that I have ever seen. This is, to date, my favorite picture.

I have another brief note about the stone walls. On some of the mountains, there are walls that seemingly lead nowhere. The reason they appear like this is because they do, in fact, lead nowhere and serve no purpose. The history behind this is that during the Great Potato Famine, the British were unwilling to help the millions of starving families in Ireland for free. Instead of helping these people out of kindness, they made the starving people work in order to receive money and food. These walls are called "famine walls" because they were the result of the British government creating fake jobs so that the Irish did not feel like they could get anything free from them. (There are no famine walls in this picture.)


This picture is of the Killary Fyjord, a 16 km (or about 10 miles) inlet from the Atlantic Ocean. It is comprised of salt water, and is home to fish, shellfish, and even dolphins!


The lines of barrels that you can see in the water are actually mussel farms. This fjord is a large supplier of mussels for the area.

Our final stop was Kylemore Castle (formerly) or currently, Kylemore Abbey.


This castle was built in the 1860s and is considered Ireland's most romantic building. Mitchell Henry, a politician of the time, built this castle for his wife. At the time, the castle cost $1.8 million to build (in the currency of that time). Just imagine what it would cost today! When Henry's wife died, he began to spend less time in the castle. Shortly afterward, one of his children died, and he could not bear to live in the castle any longer. It went on the market and was sold to an individual who did not take care of the castle like Mitchell Henry did. Years later, it went on the market again and became an abbey. The castle used to house hundreds of nuns, however, it has thinned out in recent times. Currently and unfortunately, there are only five nuns left in Kylemore Abbey.



Well that was my tour on Saturday! It was so exciting to see the Irish countryside for the first time since I had been here. Next I'll update about the sites that I toured on Sunday!