Our first challenge was getting out of the airport and onto the motorway, but we managed to do this pretty well (me driving, which I did for the whole time – quite a novelty for me!)
We stopped at Athlone for lunch then continued on our way to Galway. We thought finding the hotel in Galway might be difficult, but managed to drive right by it pretty much as soon as we entered the town! The hotel was just off the main square in Galway which led to the shopping area of entirely car-free cobbled streets -
Mum and I found a nice bar in a back street to have our first Guinness (obligatory) and then checked out some of the stores and the local sites – the Spanish Arches. After fish and chips for dinner (again, obligatory) we made our way back to the hotel.
On Saturday we drove from Galway to Sligo (where we stopped for lunch) and then detoured (at the suggestion of my Irish work colleague, Maria) to Glencar, site of a beautiful lough and waterfalls -
After a short stop, we continued on to Enniskillen (just over the border in Northern Ireland), birthplace of my Grandmother. We had booked a farmhouse B&B (Abocurragh, the #1 recommendation on Trip Advisor for Enniskillen) and found it easily with some good directions and some brown tourist signs (extremely common in these parts). Of course, not only did our hosts Bernie and Gerry have a daughter living in Melbourne, they knew one of Mum’s distant relatives who we were planning on seeing – who, in fact, lived just down the road. Enniskillen is a large-ish country town, but we were staying in Letterbreen, a one-shop village just out of Enniskillen and had not realized this was where Evelyn lived – so quite a co-incidence. So after we got settled in, Mum made a call to Evelyn and then Gerry led us by car about 10 minutes down the road where Evelyn lived.
Evelyn, husband Jack, and two of five children still at home, lived on a farm which had been in Jack’s family for four generations. Previously it had been a dairy farm, but they had recently stopped milking and now used the farm to raise cattle. We had only intended staying briefly but Evelyn forced tea (the drink) on us, then insisted we stay to ‘tea’ (the meal - served at 5pm for the men still working on the farm). After more tea (the drink), she took us to the other side of Enniskillen to Lisbellaw where my Grandmother had actually spent the first 15 years of her life before the family moved to Australia. We did a tour of the town (slighty bigger than Letterbreen) and saw the house where my Grandmother’s parents had lived -
We drove around some more and then met Mabel, a cousin of Evelyn’s, with whom my Grandmother had stayed 20 years ago when she made her first return trip to Ireland at the age of 77(!!) Mabel, Mum and Evelyn -
By the time we left Mabel it was almost 11pm and just on dusk! Mum and I were exhausted, so we dropped Evelyn off at home and headed back to Abocurragh.
We had only planned staying in Enniskillen for one night, but Evelyn had so many plans for us that we had no choice but to stay a second night! Fortunately we were able to get another night at Abocurragh with no problem. On Sunday after a full Irish breakfast, Mum and I spent the morning looking around Enniskillen although, like most of the UK, nothing much was open before midday. We had a look around the grounds and outer buildings of Castle Coole -
but unfortunately were too early for a tour of the inside and couldn’t stay later as we were due for Sunday lunch at Evelyn’s. After lunch Evelyn suggested we should go to the Marble Arch caves, about 5 miles from their house. We headed off and Evelyn waited in the café while Mum and I did the 75 minute underground tour – really very interesting. Some of the stalactites -
After the caves we made our way to Florence Court, one of the other stately homes around Enniskillen. This time we were too late for the inside tour, but again took advantage of the lovely weather (unusually hot for Northern Ireland – a sweltering 26 degrees!) to wander around the beautiful grounds and outer buildings.
The very sweet Rose Cottage -
From there we headed back to Evelyn’s for tea and then back to Lisbellaw to search the cemetery at the Lisbellaw Church of Ireland -
(where my Grandmother and her family attended church) for potential relatives and further clues for Mum to finish our family tree. While most of the headstones pre-1900 were difficult to read, Mum managed to find the grave of at least one of our ancestors.
From there, Evelyn suggested we look at the ‘old’ church cemetery. It was around 9.30pm at this stage and still quite light as we headed off down a very narrow lane to the former home of the church. If I thought it was a bit odd before to be trawling cemeteries for dead relatives, this really was the ultimate in creepiness.
With a soundtrack of eerie stillness punctuated by the shrieks of crows, this cemetery was truly the set of a gothic horror movie. With broken headstones covered in vines, partially open vaults and a dense covering of trees blocking out the light, I fully expected a zombie hand to reach up out of the ground and grab my ankle at any moment.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) there was not much of use here, so we beat a hasty retreat back to Evelyn’s for a last cup of tea before we headed back to Abocurragh.
The next morning, after another full Irish breakfast, we started towards Belfast with a few stops en route (in the end, a couple more than planned…) First stop was the Ulster American Folk Museum in Omagh – a kind of Coal Creek or Sovereign Hill (the ‘American’ in the title is reference to the mass immigration from Ireland to the US in the 17th and 18th Century, and the park was themed around the Irish in Ireland, the motivation to leave, the conditions en route and then their reaction to their new home). It was full of school kids (as I had been when I visited both Coal Creek and Sovereign Hill) but it was still quite interesting to see a couple of original houses, as well as some which had been moved to the site -
From Omagh, we headed towards Antrim, as Mum had promised her friend Florence that we would see if we could find some more information about her family. On the way there, about 10 miles out of Antrim (we were in miles in Northern Ireland), I unfortunately drove over a rock which punctured one of the front tyres of our car. We immediately pulled over and after some initial dramas (like trying to find the jack which they hide under the passenger seat), we managed to change the tyre and continue on our way (not exceeding 80kms on the somewhat narrow spare tyre – not uncommon in small cars here apparently). Props to Mum for knowing much more than I did about how to change a tyre.
Once in Antrim we found the local tourist office to see if they could help us find the village of Clough – which we assumed (yes, yes, you should never assume) to be not far out of Antrim. The people here had never heard of this village and directed us to another town, Ballymena, which they said would be closer to the area we were looking for. Once in Ballymena, we made a few circles of the town before we found their tourist office where they gave us a map directing us to Clough. Due to some traffic works and some navigation errors, we ended up going in the completely wrong direction before we worked out the map and finally moved closer to our destination. Of course, all this was happening driving around on a tyre which the hire company advised us should be only used for ‘an hour or two’, so we were additionally panicked thinking the tyre would give out at any stage (of course, I should have realized anyone giving the lifespan of a tyre in time and not in distance clearly didn’t know what they were talking about…) But finally, we made it to Clough - hoorah! Once in Clough, we took some photos and made our way to another old church graveyard to see if we could find any of Florence’s relatives -
In the end a short stay for such an epic journey!
After Clough, we headed towards Belfast along the motorway at our limited speed, and finally made it safe around 6pm. Once here, I called the roadside assist people, as instructed by the hire company, who told me not to worry about the tyre at all, and that if you kept the speed down, you could drive around on it for weeks. So after checking in to our hotel, Mum and I hit the restaurant downstairs for some excellent Italian food and a well-deserved bottle of wine.
After an early night, we got up early and made our way into town to catch the City Sightseeing bus for a tour of Belfast. Not my ideal way to take in a city, but unfortunately we had very little time so this seemed like the best option – and apart from a very annoying Canadian woman, it wasn’t too bad! Belfast prides itself on the fact that Titanic was build there, so the docks made up the initial section of the tour before we headed to the Houses of Parliament (spectacularly positioned on a hill at the end of a long tree-lined avenue) -
and then through some of the more infamous parts from the ‘Troubles’. It was hard to believe that as little as 10 or 20 years ago, you couldn’t have gone into some of these areas for fear of being killed.
The courthouse where many people were tried during the Troubles -
One of the famous murals in tribute to Bobby Sands, who died of starvation after a hunger-strike -
More murals -
At the end of the tour, we quickly headed back to our hotel to check out and pick up our car. From there we made the relatively short journey back to Dublin (during which we had rain for the first time in five days) to catch our flight back to London.
