You can meet them on Clare Island
BLAME it on the Saw Doctors. Before they composed the anthem to this Mayo outpost many people wouldn’t have been able to tell you where Clare Island was. Quite a few thought it was off County Clare, or in the Shannon Estuary.
Now everyone not only knows its location, but how to get there — as the song says, “Get the ferry out from Roonagh”.
The next line is “and wave all your cares goodbye”. On the glorious morning that was April 30, the hottest, sunniest day of the year so far, it was very easy to forget the normal dampness of a typical Irish spring and turn one’s face to the sun for the 20 minutes or so of the crossing.
There had been a few anxious moments on the road from Tuam to Roonagh. One was a flock of sheep in no hurry to go across the road from one field to another. The next was a series of slow-moving tractors.
And then there was the extremely narrow road from Louisburg to Roonagh Pier, where progress sometimes depended on finding a pull-in spot to allow some larger vehicle to pass in the other direction.
In other words, leave yourself longer than you think you’ll need to make the journey.
Apart from Davy and Leo, Clare Island’s main claim to fame is as the home of Granuaile, aka Gráinne Uí Mháille, the Gaelic female chieftain whose fleet ruled the waves from Donegal to Galway in the 16th century. Read more about her in Omnibus on Page 20.
Her castle, really a tower house, still dominates the skyline over the old and new piers. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture galleys at anchor in the bay or drawn up on the sandy beach.
On the left-hand side of the castle is a cove sheltered by rocks. It’s a great swimming spot, we were told. You just need to be prepared to hold on to a rope as you make your way down to it, or more important, up from it.
Less well known than the Granuaile connection is Clare Island Abbey. It was established by monks from Abbeyknockmoy, a few miles from Tuam, and it has some very important medieval wall and ceiling paintings.
It’s almost miraculous that these have survived. The section of the church that contains them was ........
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