Westport Mayo
Westport is the most attractive and most complete planned Georgian town in Ireland, a market town in County Mayo on the shores of Clew Bay whose combination of the octagonal market square, the tree-lined Mall following the canalised Carrowbeg River and the surrounding streets of Georgian town houses creates one of the finest examples of eighteenth-century Irish urban planning. The town was designed by James Wyatt in the 1780s for the Browne family, later Marquesses of Sligo, whose Westport House provides the great Georgian mansion at the heart of the estate. The town's position at the foot of Croagh Patrick, the sacred mountain of Ireland's patron saint from whose summit the views encompass the entirety of Clew Bay and the islands that fill it, gives Westport a pilgrim dimension alongside its secular charms. The annual Reek Sunday pilgrimage to the summit of Croagh Patrick on the last Sunday of July attracts tens of thousands of pilgrims who ascend the quartzite cone in the tradition that has been maintained since St Patrick fasted on the summit in 441 AD. The Great Western Greenway, a 42-kilometre off-road cycling and walking trail from Westport to Achill Island following the former Midland Great Western Railway line through the Connaught landscape, provides one of the finest greenway experiences in Ireland. The combination of the town's Georgian quality, the pilgrimage mountain, the greenway and the extraordinary bay landscape makes Westport one of the most rewarding towns in the west of Ireland.