Exploring Connemara, the land of Leprechauns and fairies and other legends, Monday 2nd June

I was never one to believe in leprechauns and fairies and the legends of old, but just perhaps I might have to change my mine, because there really were some very small people living in this part of North West Ireland in days gone by! I couldn't fit under the doorway!

For our trip today we followed the route of one of the popular tours of the Connemara.  First stop was the Ross Errily Friary, and it was in the middle of a field surrounded by very contented sheep and cows, and was an amazing structure.  It was built in 1300's by the Franciscan monks,  Cromwell evicted them in the 1600's and they came back in the 1700's.  There was a lot of thought and technique involved in the building.

I thought of my friend Sal when I was taking these photos, all the lovely shapes

But the reason for going to the Connemara was to walk in the footsteps of my Blake family.  They were one of the 14 Tribes of Galway, rich merchants that made the rules and divided the lands between them.  You could only marry a person from one of the Tribes, for what reason?  But they did become the ruling class, and we had numerous castles around and about Galway.

Then I found a couple of chests/tombs belonging to members of the Blakes, I guess the coffins were stored inside the chests given the handles that allowed entry into the box.

Actually there were a lot of grave stones in the Abbey, I took some photos just in case one of your relatives was buried there!

Next stop was Cong Village.  Another old abbey and a pretty village at the head of a huge lake, Lake Corrib.  The waters from the lake flow into the rives and out to Galway Bay.

Again there were lots of graves in fact the cemetery has a series of steps made of graves.

Peaceful river flows along the Abbey

A film called Quite Man was made in here in 1951, bit before my time! But Maureen  O'Hara played the role.

Probably a great location for more up to the moment movies!  Stunning scenery huge towering mountains, valleys

Ashton Castle Ireland's Premier Castle Hotel

The next important attraction was the Glebe Stone Circle.  Now Stonehenge it is not, and Glen Innis neither, but this dates from the early Neolithic Period,

and is well preserved, because you cannot get to it, or maybe you can if you are a leprechaun!

We passed Lough Nafooey with majestic mountains, rivers, some small waterfalls, stone fences by the dozen, sheep paths up the very steep sides, and no photos to prove we where there!

365 islands make up Lake Corrib here are some of them

We finally came to a town Leeaune, at the head of the only fiord in Ireland, called Killary Fiord.  There were mussel farms in the harbour and they tell us that dolphins like to swim in the waters.  Well not today.  In fact the whole area was devoid of any wildlife including birds, might have something to do with the fact that peat is collected here, and the waters are very black from the tannin in the peat.

Peat is dug, and then dried in piles so that it can be used in the fires and it smells horrible as we smelt yesterday!

 Now you know why Guinness is black!

A little further along and we saw Kylemore Abbey, said to be the most romantic building, another Monastic home of the Benedictine Order of Nuns in Ireland, so maybe it was not so pretty in the 19th century when they were in residence, if you can go by some of the novels that are written.

Anyway it was packed, about 6 coaches, and a full carpark because this is where the buses take the tourists for lunch.

The B&B across the lake!

The scenery is rather lovely, especially the moss on the tree trunks and this lovely purple bush that was everywhere.

We made our way towards Renvyle Peninsula.  This would have to be one of the most remote places on the NW Irish coast, and I met the locals.  Smuggling was rife here in the past.  But also it was part of 27000 acres that the Blake family owned, and built a house there 500 years ago.  Then they disappeared from Ireland for a couple of hundred years, or at least from this part, because my line were busy in West Indies growing sugar in the mid 1700's, so they became absentee landlords.

I tried for land rights, as a family member, but instead had a most fascinating conversation with a local whose family owned 300,000 acres before Queen Elizabeth I repossessed it and gave it to people of her persuasion.

The landlords of the day removed all the natural timber leaving the poor farmers and workers with no livelihood as there was nothing to hunt for food.  Then the owners amalgamated all the land to make large plots to run sheep and cattle.

This was built as a guest house, now Renvyle House Hotel, very popular with cyclists

We had a short drive around the harbour, to one of the castles that was built way back when, and which the local Pirate Queen fired a cannon into.  Will have to research this lady, but she used to rob all the boats that came into land from places far away, and the authorities could never catch her.  She was born on the same day as Queen Elizabeth, and met her one time, because QE was most impressed with her life!

Pretty wild waters.

We found flax growing in the area, but haven't seen any Linen outlets at all.

But for the knitters, have you ever wondered how they get striped wool?  Well let me share that with you.,

Some woolly jumpers!  The sheep have horns, I think they must be Mountain Sheep because the country would be very suitable for Mountain Goats.

Now to the story of the Queen of the Pirates!  Not my words, but interesting enough!

Grace O'Malley was a tough-ass 16th century Irish warrior chick who led a horde of broadsword-swinging Vikings, Celts, and Scottish Highlanders in naval operations that would dominate the coast of Ireland for a couple of decades. Known to her contemporaries as "The Pirate Queen of Connaught," this estrogenocidal ginger gunslinger raided shipping vessels, battled English armies, conquered castles from rival Irish clans, and once traveled to London just so she could talk shit to Queen Elizabeth in person.

She pretty much rocks ass.

The future Pirate Queen's life began innocently enough. She was born in Ireland in 1530, a time when the crazy horn-bag King Henry the Eighth was beheading half the female population of England and nobody really gave a crap what the Irish were doing as long as they didn't screw with the English territories in Ulster. Her actual name was Gráinne Ní Mháille, but nowadays we of course Anglicize it to Grace O'Malley because that's much easier to say, it uses fewer accent marked-characters when we type it, and because I think there's some kind of rule about how we have to change pretty much all Irish peoples' crazy unpronounceable names so that they start with either O' or Mc.

Grace came from a wealthy seafaring family that lived on the Western coast of Ireland. Her Dad, the leader of Clan O'Malley, made most of his money sailing around trading shit to Spain, England, France and Portugal, and also by collecting a fee from fishermen who used his waters. As a girl, Grace quickly realized that she didn't want to sit around the house boiling potatoes all day with her boring mom, so it wasn't long before she was begging her father to take her out to sea on his trading expeditions. Dad understandably wasn't all that pumped about taking his teenage daughter out into pirate-infested waters, so he made up some bullshit story and told Gracie she couldn't come because her hair was too long and it would get stuck in the rigging on the ship or whatever. Grace, as you will soon learn, wasn't the sort of chick who flinched when it came to make a decision between pussying out and doing badass shit, however, and the next day Dad went out to the docks and saw that his daughter had cut off all of her hair with a knife and was ready to rock out on the high seas.

He couldn't exactly say no.

The Cock's Castle, so named because the guy who lived there was a cock.
(Also because it looks vaguely phallic.)

Grace quickly proved herself not only as an able seawoman capable of pulling her own weight aboard a merchant vessel, but her ability to work ship, lead men, and spot storms on the horizon before anyone else quickly led to her being promoted to serve as her father's second-in-command (even above some of her older brothers!) on trading expeditions. Known to the crew as "Grace the Bald" because of her short hair, one story claims that when her ship was overtaken and boarded by pirates, she personally saved the lives of one of her crew members by leaping off the rigging in the middle of a melee and dive-bombing a pirate death from above-style. I picture this going down like a luchador busting out a top-rope moonsault to the outside of the ring, but I think that's probably just me.

Once her sea legs were firmly established and she'd made quite a life for herself tearing ass around the high seas for fun and profit and badassery, the 16-year old Grace was married off in 1546 to a guy named Donal of the Battle (or, alternately, as Donal "of the Battle" O'Flaherty). Donal was a tough, easily-irritable Irish hothead who lived in a place awesomely called "The Cock's Castle" and spent most of his time being an asshole to people from neighboring clans. Donal the Cock was eventually killed in battle after he pissed off Clan Joyce for some reason that is never really explicitly defined (except to say that he was asking for it), and they charged Cock Castle and captured it (Grace immediately raised an army, personally stormed the walls at the head of an army, and re-took her dead husband's castle by force – the Joyces renamed it "The Hen's Castle," the name by which it is still known today). Later, she'd marry a guy named "Iron Richard" Burke who had a real affinity for chainmail, foundries, and accomplishing nothing of any importance. Iron Dick was fine, I guess, but she'd basically married him for political reasons and after a year of betrothal she locked him out of his own castle and threw all his shit on the lawn. When Dick came home and was all like "WTF?", she leaned out the window and yelled, "Richard, I dismiss you!" So he left without an argument and she spent the rest of her life cougaring it up with guys she found shipwrecked on the shore (presumably immediately after her pirate army had sunk their ships).

But marriage isn't what defined the Pirate Queen. Upon the deaths of her father and husband, Grace O'Malley inherited big swaths of coastal land and castles, and using her own ingenuity, ruthlessness, and badassery she turned that territory into a criminal empire of piratical stabbing awesomeness that would make the shipping and fishing industries its bitch for the remainder of O'Malley's long, ultra-grizzled life.

The Pirate Kingdom of Grace O'Malley started off innocuously enough, I suppose. Grace's father had implemented a tax on fishing and merchant ships that moved through his waters – a nominal fee akin to how many nobles put tolls on roads through their land. Well Grace took this operation over and immediately cranked that organized racketeering shit up to 12, building a small navy of scurvy Irishmen and sending out her fleet to collect taxes and tolls from an ever-increasing area of the western coast. If people refused to pay the toll or looked like they might possibly refuse to pay the toll, Grace's henchmen would board the ship pirate-style, kick the shit out of everyone on board, take whatever the hell they wanted, and bring the loot back to the Sea Queen for distribution among her servants. Eventually Grace stopped even calling it a tax, and the toll-collecting business became a full-scale piracy operation that would make the modern-day Somali warlords proud.

Like all famous Irish people,
Grace has a bunch of pubs named after her.

Before long, Grace began to augment her already-touch pirate force by recruiting warriors known as the Gallowglass – an elite, tough group of claymore-swinging face-crushers who obliterated everyone in their path in an explosion of blood spray and flying dismembered appendages. The Gallowglass, in a nutshell, are the result of what happened when the Vikings landed in Scotland, set up villages, and intermarried with the Scottish Highlanders. So they're like Viking Highlanders. I can think of little that is more terrifying.

With these guys at the vanguard of her forces (augmented by tough whisky-swilling Irishmen), Grace not only hit shipping and fishing traffic, but soon started pummeling coastal fortresses and capturing large swaths of territory from any Clans unfortunate enough to be positioned in her zone of authority. She also build up merchant trade with England, Ulster, Spain, France and Portugal, accumulating huge quantities of cash from those wealthy countries, but that's marginally less interesting than the Scots-Irish Vikings storming fortresses with cannons and battle axes.

Grace taking a smoke break and thinking about axes.

While ruling an empire of Viking Highlander Pirates is sweet and all, O'Malley was a tough lady herself as well, more than happy to wade into combat herself, and this was definitely not the sort of chick you wanted to cross swords with on the smoke-swept deck of a burning merchantman. One story claims that she gave birth to her third child on the high seas during a trading expedition to the Mediterranean. As she was popping the kid out, word came down that the vessel was under attack by Turkish pirates, so she finished giving birth, grabbed her gun, then immediately ran out to bust caps in pirates and command the defense of her ship. Another time one of her boyfriends was captured and executed by a rival clan, so she waited until the leaders of the Clan landed on an island for vacation, attacked the island, burned their ships, and killed everyone she could find. After wiping out the leadership of the Clan, she then led her soldiers to assault the Clan fortress, capturing it and reappropriating it for her own use. On yet another occasion a local English Earl refused to let Grace in when she stopped by for dinner, so she kidnapped the Earl's son and held him for ransom, only returning him when the Earl decided he'd cook her some bacon and leave an extra place setting out for the rest of his life, just in case she ever decided to show up again (this is a tradition that the family maintains to this day).

As a pretty bitchin' side note, when the Spanish Armada came to attack England in 1588, one of the warships of the Armada got lost in a storm and ended up getting stuck in waters controlled by the Sea Queen of Connaught. Grace O'Malley personally led the attack that captured the war galleon. She was 50 years old at the time.

Grace meeting Queen Elizabeth.

This has been on the History Channel, and the report can be found online, in the Badass Series. Now do we all believe in Irish stories? or are they just a yarn, but you have seen the photo of the castle!