Galway, Ireland
Galway is small. About eighty thousand people, and a quarter of them are students, which is why a city this size has the music scene it does. Shop Street on a Saturday has buskers every twenty metres and some of them are very good indeed.
It rains. Not occasionally, constantly, and everyone has simply decided not to discuss it. Bring a proper coat rather than an umbrella, because the wind off the Atlantic will take an umbrella apart in about a minute.
The bunting above Shop Street is national flags, and it stays up year round. So do the buskers, in the rain, without appearing to notice.
Things worth doing:
- Walk the Latin Quarter and the Spanish Arch, which is what remains of the sixteenth century city walls. The name comes from the trade Galway did with Spain, and there is still a Spanish influence in the older buildings.
- The Kings Head on High Street has been a pub since 1649 and tells a story about why. The building is said to have been given to the man who executed Charles I, who was beheaded that year and whose face is on the sign outside. Nobody has ever proved it. It is a good pub regardless, with music most nights.
- O’Maille, a few doors along, has been selling Aran knitwear since 1938 and supplied the sweaters for The Quiet Man. If you are buying one jumper in Ireland, buy it somewhere like this rather than at the airport.
- The Claddagh was a fishing village outside the walls and is where the Claddagh ring comes from: two hands holding a crowned heart, worn one way if you are taken and the other if you are not.
- Walk the Salthill promenade out along the bay and kick the wall at the end. Everyone does it. Nobody can quite explain why.
- Galway International Arts Festival takes over the city for two weeks in July, and the Races do the same in late July. Both are worth planning around, or avoiding, depending on what you want.
Using Galway as a base:
- Connemara starts about forty minutes west: bog, mountains, and Kylemore Abbey sitting on a lake. This is the Ireland people picture.
- The Cliffs of Moher are around an hour and a half south. Go early or late. The middle of the day is coaches.
- The Aran Islands are a ferry from Rossaveal, west of the city. Irish is the everyday language out there, and the stone walls divide the fields into pieces the size of a room.
- The Burren, on the way to the cliffs, is a limestone plateau that looks like nowhere else in Ireland and grows Arctic and Mediterranean plants side by side.