Country Article / Postcards

WEEKEND IN GALWAY

Date: 06/22/2003

Dear International Living Reader,

Seated at a front window table in the second-floor restaurant, drinking good wine, eating a good steak, looking out over flower boxes to a constant flow of merry-makers...I had to remind myself we were in Ireland.

Galway is the least Irish of Irish cities. It's a university town, with outdoor cafes and art galleries...as well as a serious tourist destination (it's the gateway to Ireland's "Wild West"). The narrow cobblestoned streets of its old town, today for pedestrians only, are lined with shops and eateries and, in the evenings, buskers and entertainers (including a fire-eater this weekend). This time of year, these lanes are crowded, and you have to jockey for an outside table at the restaurants.

Our dinner at Galway's premier steak and seafood house followed a morning at the beach (there are three "Blue Flag"--that is, clean and nice--beaches within 20 minutes of the city) and an afternoon of shopping (we bought a set of eight Waterford crystal wine goblets on sale for 250 euro at a shop called Cobwebs).

After dinner, we walked five minutes to the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, the largest medieval parish church in this country, built in 1320 on the site of an earlier chapel. Christopher Columbus, whose final departure point for the New World was Galway, is said to have prayed in this church the night before he set sail. We visited Saturday not for worship, but music. The New German Symphonie was entertaining this Midsummer's Eve, on violin, with works by Mozart and Bach. It was a warm, clear evening, and the mammoth church doors were kept open while the young Germans played.

Galway is called the "City of the Tribes." It was settled in the mid-13th century by 14 merchant families, many of whom kept "town-castles" near the port. Lynch's town-castle, at the corner of Shop Street and William Street, is perfectly preserved and worth seeing for the architectural details of its exterior, including gargoyls and the family crest. Don't expect a castle tour, though. The building today houses the Galway branch of Allied Irish Bank.

Your editor, back home in Waterford,

Kathleen Peddicord
Publisher, International Living

P.S. The area around St. Nicholas' church is given over to an open-air market every Saturday morning, a good place to shop for fresh vegetables and trinkets.

P.P.S. We spent Saturday night at the Great Southern Hotel, situated grandly at the head of Galway's central Eyre Square. This is the place to stay in this town. We started out, Friday night, at Cregg Castle, in Corrandulla, about 9 miles outside Galway. Cregg is historic (355 years old) and said to have been renovated. Your hosts, the Brodericks, are friendly and musical and entertain around the fire most evenings with guitars and Irish drums. We made our reservations on the recommendation of a guidebook, liking the idea of a castle-hotel. But this was the Best Western of castle-hotels. We canceled our second night's stay after our welcome tour, and, because of our last-minute booking, enjoyed rooms at the Great Southern (http://www.gshotels.com/) for not a lot more than we'd paid at Cregg.

P.P.P.S. (I've saved this for last so you can skip it if you're in a hurry...or if architectural history doesn't interest you.) About a half-hour outside Galway, traveling toward Clifden, you come to Kinvara. Here is a perfectly restored tower house, called Dunguaire. You see these all over Ireland, but the landscapes of East County Clare, East County Limerick, and South County Galway are well marked with them. They are not technically castles, because they had no military purpose. Rather, they were built as private residences, the fashionable style of construction among wealthy farmers and landlords from 1450 to 1650. If you were successful in the 15th or 16th century...you built your family a tower house. They were typically four levels, three above the ground floor, and square, with a circular staircase to one side. At Dunguaire you can see traces of the original wickerwork on the ceiling of the ground floor (stone arched ceilings like this one were built on a bed of wickerwork that kept the stones in place until the arch was completed) and the original stone corbels, which held the joists for the original floor boards.