Ireland day 8 - Sunday 12th June

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A moving on day.

We tidied up and left Cloonloo, heading west. Our first stop was in Ballina, advertising itself as the salmon capital of Ireland. It’s situated on the River Moy, and hosts an annual salmon festival. Unfortunately, as our visit was on Sunday almost all of the town was shut. We did spot several fishermen up to their hips in the river, though. There were no catches while we were watching them.

After a brief stroll, we headed off again towards Bangor Erris, not stopping there but turning south along the coast road. After a while we, spotted a sign to Doona Castle, so made the first detour of the day. After a drive of a couple of miles on a very narrow road no castle was visible, so we stopped to ask a local whether this was the right direction. He pointed across the field to a stack of rocks and said, ‘That’s it! It’s the ruin of a castle.’ He wasn’t kidding! He told us that the shell of a building near to it was an old Abbey, and that there was some information about the Spanish Armada on a plaque that we could take a photo of. He also warned us that the road to it wasn’t very good. He was right! After negotiating the potholes, we pulled up next to the Abbey. Signs on the gates between us and the castle made it very clear that we weren’t able to get any closer as it was an active working farm. We spent a little while looking around the Abbey ruins and the local graveyard adjacent to it, before moving on again.

Our next detour was to Mulranny Beach where we had another little stroll, the wind clearing our heads and waking us up a bit. The sea defense was lots of rocks, some were the usual grey rock colour, others were red, and some even blue; very pretty! We then sat out of the wind in Sherri, and ate left over pizza for lunch.

One very noticeable thing around this area was the huge number of Rhododendrons, certainly more than we had seen to date. Long stretches of road were lined with very established plants. If you search for 'Rhododendron Ireland’ you’ll see why it’s an issue.

We had a planned stop at Westport, a lovely town! In fact, we agreed that it was probably the nicest town we’d been to so far. Sadly, most of it was shut as it was still Sunday, but we managed to get cake and coffee, ingested while overlooked by a statue of St Patrick. The town is bright, colourful, clean and has some interesting shops which we would have loved to look around had they been open.

Our host, Mary, welcomed us to our next cottage, about 2.5km outside Kinvarra. It’s a lovely little place situated just behind her main home. We planned to go into town to explore and maybe sample the Guinness. By good luck Mary was on her way to meet her son in town about 15 minutes after we arrived, so we grabbed a lift in from her. After a brief wander around, we discovered Tully’s, a small, dark traditional Irish bar. The barman had an excellent sense of humour, and pulled a good pint! We hung around to listen to Eilish McConnell & friends playing traditional Irish folk music. It started off with Ms McConnell on her fiddle being accompanied by a man playing an accordion. Over the next 45 minutes several other people arrived and unpacked instruments. There were 9 musicians when we left – 4 fiddles, accordion, guitar, penny whistle, flute, mandolin. They certainly got your feet tapping!

We moved onto another bar called Sextons, which also had music playing and where Mary had recommended we go. The ambiance was brighter and more modern, but Susan said the Guinness was just as good. There were 4 musicians here playing guitar, a mandolin, another larger stringed instrument that we didn’t recognise, and a young woman playing either a Bodhran or a concertina depending on the tune. She and the man playing the guitar also sang at various times; great talent and equally as toe-tapping!

As we had a 2.5km walk back and hadn’t eaten yet, we left early and wandered up the road. We stopped to say hello to a field of cows with their calves, and a bit further along, 3 lovely donkeys who were very happy to have their heads scratched!

Today was around 16000 steps and 10km.

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