Kilreekil is a good 40 minutes east of Galway by motorway. This means it has comparatively nice weather (although, being in western Ireland, this doesn't say a great deal) but all of the exciting places are a long, long drive away. The two things you're really supposed to do here, apparently, are to go to Clifden and the Aran Islands. This is the only decent picture I got from our excursion to Clifden: it's An Caoláire Rua, Ireland's largest (or possibly only) fjord (or fjard - thank you, pedants of Wikipedia). Here you see the faintest glimmering of sun through the heavy clouds, which totally justified driving for five hours to not really see any other views. Inis Mór, by comparison, is pretty easy to get to: only 75 minutes' drive to the harbour and then a 40 minute ferry ride. By this time I was not quite driving like a local, but definitely complaining loudly at foreign-registered camper-vans and people going more than 20 kph below the speed limit. It's impossible to take pictures that do the scenery justice - or at least not with my limited skill and equipment. We decided to walk everywhere rather than hiring bikes (or a horse and cart), which meant we didn't get to see as much of the island as we might have, but saw almost all of it with nobody else around. This is Dún Eochla, which all the books say is a superbly preserved ringfort on top of the highest point of the island. Unfortunately, somebody's built what appears to be an enormous water tank in front of it, and put up gates and signs saying you can't actually go there. The big rocks in the foreground in the picture are the top of the water tank, which I climbed on top of to get the best view we could. The view down the hill from Dún Eochla: this is the best picture I got of how the place looks. The strange blue colour above the sea seems to be an atypical metereological phenomenon. Found this in a dry stone wall - a glacial erratic? The harbour at low tide - again, this is a pale imitation of what it really looked like. I'm fairly sure this is where I stayed the last time I was here, back in the early '90s. This was parked across from Joe Watty's Bar. Father Ted still casts a long shadow here: in one tourist information place they had directions to the actual house from the titles. They offer organic home-baked teas for ten euros a head, but ask that you book in advance.
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