Today we had scheduled a tour of Galway. We had wanted to visit Galway the last time we were here but it didn’t fit into the schedule, but Castlebar is only 1.5 hours from the city so we made it a priority to visit this time.

We had breakfast in-house this morning. I had the “Irish breakfast”, of course, and it was delicious. Isabelle had scrambled eggs with smoked salmon; I learned to love porridge and Isabelle has learned to love smoked salmon as a result of this trip.

Since our tour wasn’t scheduled until 2PM, we opted to take a detour to Kylemore Abby, and it was a great choice because we saw the best scenery we had seen on this trip, and that’s saying a lot.

We ran into a bit of a concern, however; as mentioned in yesterday’s post there was a bike race going through the area, and on the way to Kylemore, we ran into it, albeit on the other side of the road. We remarked that we were glad that the bikers weren’t holding up our traffic…

Kylemore Castle was built by Mitchell Henry, a wealthy doctor from London who, with his wife Margaret championed both the local population and Irish independence. Unfortunately, Margaret died four years after the castle was completed. Mitchell lived there for 20 more years before dying. Both he and his wife are interred in a small mausoleum located on the property.

The castle was sold to the Duke of Manchester who owned it for a few years before being forced to sell it to satisfy gambling debts. It was purchased by Benedictine Nuns in 1920 after they were forced to flee Ypres during WWI. They continue to own and operate the castle as an abbey, and had run a girl’s school there until 2010.

The grounds of the castle are massive, and include a walled Victorian garden, horse paddock, and pig stye in addition to the original castle facilities like the mausoleum of the Henrys, their ruined boat-house, and other locations that we weren’t able to see on account of the fact we had to head to Galway. The Universe, being indifferent and sometimes outright bitchy, put us behind the continuing bike race this time, probably because we were so happy we weren’t behind them before.

Our tour was a “Medieval History of Galway” and we met our guide Martine at “The Browne Doorway” which is the remains of a manor house belonging to one of the 14 major merchant “tribes” who ruled Galway in the 16th and 17th centuries.

We walked around the city, visiting several different historical locations including the remains of a city wall now located in a shopping center.

After the tour, we wandered about on our own. We passed by the former haunt of a friend of ours who spent some time in Galway when he was younger. We had lunch elsewhere, and ducked in and out of a few shops to see if we couldn’t find the few souvenirs that we still hadn’t collected.