What is Connemara?
There are those who will argue about this question all day, because Connemara is neither a province nor a county, has no administrative status and no marked boundaries. The safe answer is that it forms the western portion of County Galway, between the Republic of Ireland’s largest lake, Lough Corrib, and the wild Atlantic coast, and includes numerous offshore islands, some of which are inhabited. Part of the northern boundary is defined by the steep-sided, nine-mile-long Killary Fjord, which would not look out of place in Norway. Gaelic is spoken throughout much of the broad, brooding peninsula, but Connemara’s “capital”, Clifden, is picture-postcard pretty and regarded as an “English” sort of town. A set of contradictions, then. What’s the main attraction? No difficulty with that one: the remarkable diversity of landscapes and weather, and the warmth of the people who live for the most part in straggling, roadside communities rather than formal towns or villages, amid scenery of eleme
