Scenic Point in County Galway

Connemara National Park in County Galway is one of the most wild and most beautiful landscapes in Ireland, a national park of approximately 2,000 hectares covering a section of the Connemara uplands and lowlands between Letterfrack and the Twelve Bens mountain range whose combination of the blanket bog, the mountain scenery, the Atlantic light and the character of the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht communities surrounding the park creates one of the most powerful natural landscapes in the west of Ireland. The park visitor centre at Letterfrack provides interpretation and the starting point for the walking routes into the mountains. The Twelve Bens, the quartzite mountain range visible from across a wide area of Connemara, provide the mountain walking of the most challenging and most rewarding character available in the national park. The summits of Benbaun, Bencullagh and the other peaks of the range offer views across the full extent of Connemara to the Atlantic in the west and the inland loughs of Galway to the east in panoramas of extraordinary quality. The quartzite rock gives the upper slopes a pale, almost white colour that creates a distinctive visual character quite different from the darker gritstone or granite mountains of other Irish upland regions. The blanket bog of the lower park, one of the finest remaining examples of intact Atlantic blanket bog in Ireland, supports a remarkable community of specialist plants including sundews, bog rosemary and various bog mosses, and the characteristic Connemara ponies that graze the park provide a living connection to the traditional livestock management of this landscape.

Kinvara is a small village on the south shore of Galway Bay in County Galway whose combination of the perfectly scaled harbour, the sixteenth-century Dunguaire Castle on the headland above the bay and the character of an authentic Galway Bay fishing community creates one of the most rewarding and most photographed small village destinations in Connacht. The castle reflected in the still water of the harbour at high tide provides one of the most frequently reproduced images of the west of Ireland. Dunguaire Castle, a sixteenth-century tower house associated with the kings of Connacht, stands on a low promontory extending into the bay and the combination of the water on three sides, the intact tower and battlements and the views across Galway Bay to the Burren hills to the south creates a castle setting of considerable charm. The castle hosts medieval banquets in summer in the tradition established at other Shannon Heritage properties, providing a theatrical dimension to a building that is already scenically exceptional. The annual Cruinniú na mBád, the gathering of traditional sailing vessels on Kinvara Bay each August, is one of the finest traditional boat festivals in Ireland, the Galway hookers and other traditional western Irish sailing vessels racing in the bay in a celebration of the maritime heritage of the Galway coast that draws large crowds of spectators and participants.