Connemara National Park

Connemara National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Connemara National Park is a small park in a large and famous landscape, in the far west of County Galway, with its entrance and visitor centre at the village of Letterfrack, an hour and a half from Galway city by the road through Oughterard and Clifden. It is free, including the car park and the exhibition, and what people do there is climb Diamond Hill. Four waymarked, colour-coded loops start from the visitor centre, all on excellent gravel paths and boardwalks: a short nature trail, the Sruffaunboy loop of a kilometre and a half, the Lower Diamond Hill walk of three kilometres, an easy hour, and the Upper Diamond Hill loop, which continues from it up stone steps to the summit and back round, about seven kilometres and two and a half to three hours in all, steep near the top, exposed to the weather, and rewarded with the best accessible view in the west of Ireland.

The day tours from Galway drive a circuit of Connemara, by the Inagh valley or the coast road, and stop for two to three hours at either the national park or Kylemore Abbey, five minutes down the road, sometimes leaving the choice to each passenger; two hours is enough for the lower loop and not for the summit, so walkers should choose a tour that says so, or a private hiking tour. Guided hill walks elsewhere in Connemara, such as the climb of Errisbeg from Roundstone, are sold by local guides, and the park itself organises free guided nature walks on some summer mornings. There is a tea room at the centre.

Visiting Connemara National Park: what you will see

The park opened in 1980 and covers about 2,000 hectares on the north-western flank of the Twelve Bens, or Beanna Beola, the compact cluster of quartzite peaks that forms the heart of Connemara; four of them, Benbaun, the highest at 729 metres, Bencullagh, Benbrack and Muckanaght, lie within it. Most of the land came from the Kylemore Abbey estate, and the rest from the Letterfrack industrial school, whose buildings now house the visitor centre, an institution for boys run by the Christian Brothers from 1887 to 1974 and notorious for the cruelty practised there; a small graveyard in the woods holds the boys who died. Diamond Hill, Binn Ghuaire, 442 metres, a cone of pale quartzite that glitters after rain, stands apart from the main range, and from its ridge the view runs from the Bens and the Maumturks inland, down to Kylemore's lake and castle directly below, across the drowned, ragged coastline to the islands of Inishbofin and Inishturk, Tully mountain and the sands of Ballynakill harbour, and north to Mweelrea and Croagh Patrick.

The slopes are western blanket bog and wet heath, purple moor grass, bog cotton, ling and bell heather, the insect-eating sundews and butterworts, bog asphodel, and, a botanical curiosity, St Dabeoc's heath, a plant of Spain and Portugal that grows in Ireland only in this region; the old turf banks, where peat was cut for the estate's fires, and the ridges of abandoned potato fields from before the Famine can still be traced. A herd of pure-bred Connemara ponies, descended from a gift of President Childers, grazes the fields by the entrance. Red deer have been reintroduced, and meadow pipits, skylarks, stonechats, ravens, kestrels, peregrines and merlins are the birds of the hill. Megalithic court tombs four thousand years old lie in the northern part of the park.

Connemara National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The grounds are open all year at all hours, and the visitor centre daily from about 9 am to 5.30 pm from March to October, with shorter hours or closure in winter. May and June have the longest days, the driest weather, relatively, and the fewest midges; July and August are the busiest, when the car park fills by late morning; in late August and September the heather turns the hills purple.

Rain, wind and low cloud can come on any day of the year, and the upper trail is not worth climbing, and can be dangerous, in fog or a gale; bring waterproofs and proper shoes even for the lower loop. Allow three hours. Kylemore Abbey and its walled garden are five minutes east, Clifden and the Sky Road twenty minutes south, Killary fjord half an hour north, and Galway an hour and a half.