Entries of the category Hidden Gems / Back home
One of the four provinces of Ireland. This Northwest province covers an area of 6838 square miles. It has a population of around 500,000. Connacht is the least arable but one of the most beautiful provinces of Ireland. Its name derives from the Connachta , followers of Conn of the Hundred Battles , a branch of the Venii tribe [...]
A picturesque valley in the Wicklow Hills. Glendalough is……according to its name……the valley of the two lakes…..but it is also the valley of two saints. These are Kevin, a hermit who died in 618 and around whose grave a famous monastery was later built, and Laurence O’Toole, an abbot who died in 1182 and was canonized in [...]
Ireland’s second largest county, in the province of Connacht. Extending from the Atlantic to the River Shannon (area of 2,374 square miles), the county has a population of over 208,000. Galway City, the county capital, straddles the divide between the barren Irish-speaking Connemara to the west and the fertile farmland of the east. It is a vibrant, [...]
County Louth is a maritime county in the province of Leinster….woth seeing on tours of Ireland. Ireland’s smallest county, only 318 square miles, Louth is, however, more heavily populated than other larger counties because it has the major towns of Drogheda and Dundalk near both its northern and southern extremities. These two towns together account for [...]
Along with Newgrange and Dowth , Knowth forms a great Neolithic cemetery on a ridge of hills north of the Boyne river, some miles upstream from Drogheda, County Louth. It dates from around 3000 B.C…… making it older than the Pyramids. Knowth has two separate tombs back-to-back within a large earthen moundone corbeled , like that in Newgrange, [...]
Inland county in the province of Leinster. After Leitrim , the landlocked county of Longford (421 square miles) is the second least populated county in Ireland, with 31,500 inhabitants. Primarily agricultural, the county has some light industry and textile production. The reputation of being of being a flat midland county is not really justified. The western part, [...]