Rockyview Farm / Fuchsia Room /Violet Room .

20/02/2026

10/12/2024

“Mr Cool”

10/12/2024

28/07/2024

Otter footprints in the sand this morning at Fanore Beach.

21/05/2024

21/05/2024

20/05/2024

20/05/2024

'There is much talk of a Spanish strain on this Galway coast.

Undoubtedly, commerce was constant between Galway Bay and the Iberian peninsula, but the truth is that you have in western Ireland, as in western Spain, survivals of a race which the red-haired people pushed off the good lands towards the limit of the sea.

On the Claddagh at Galway I have seen a man at work in his cottage mending a net, who might have posed for the model of a Basque peasant; and the olive-skinned fisher folk about the great mackerel-curing station at Cleggan (near Clifden) are simply variants of a type that repeats itself along the coasts of Spain.

In Claddagh, nearly all the shipping consists in fishing boats: many trawlers, but most numerous of all, the little hookers worked by the fishermen who live across the river in this very odd community called the Claddagh.

These people till recently had a "king" of their own (just as happens on the small islands of the coast) and they lived their own life, and indeed still live it, almost wholly distinct from the regular townsfolk.

Their thatched cottages scattered in a huddled group without streets or plan of any kind make a curious feature of the place.

In the main street of the town lives a jeweller who manufactures still the Claddagh ring which these folk and the Aran people use for marriage or betrothal: joined hands surmounted by a crowned heart make an emblem which needs no posy to expound it. '

Written by Stephen Gwynn (1907)

Pictured are the people of Claddagh, as drawn by an artist from the Illustrated News, London.