Lakes and Kylemore Abbey in Ireland!

After having visited the Cliffs of Moher we decided to travel a bit by car and visit Kylemore Abbey

There are quite a few castles and old monasteries in Ireland (of which quite a few are ruins) that are worth visiting. But before we stop by Kylemore Abbey, there was some road to cover which took us through the hills and by lakes which were bathed in beautiful sunlight.

Traveling through the western parts of Ireland will often take you on roads which look like this (and yes this is the car we used):

You won't find many trees here as unfortunately most of them were cut down over several centuries; but the landscape reminded me a lot to the Fjäll area in Sweden I visited earlier. You will find a wild landscape here with many hills and stones as well as some very fresh and clear lakes that look inviting for a swim (although I would not necessarily recommend it as they are generally below 10°C).

The lakes are of course very beautiful if you can catch a sunny day; it felt like I jumped into a Bob Ross painting...

And then of course you have the many rivers that feed into the lakes or the ocean which actually can harbor wild salmon! There are some places where you can buy some fresh or dried as well. Again, the landscape here feels very untamed and I wonder who would live in the few houses one can spot from a distance. It definitely requires a certain personality and a way of life to be able to live here.

After some hours of driving we arrived at Kylemore Abbey which immediately struck me as an almost surreal place. The history of this building is actually very interesting as it is now a Benedictine monastery which was founded in 1920 on the grounds of Kylemore Castle. The abbey was founded for Benedictine Nuns who fled Belgium in World War I. This of course raises the question of who built Kylemore Castle? It is actually not as ancient as one might suspect. It was built only in 1868 as a private home for the family of Mitchell Henry who was obviously quite wealthy - a doctor by profession and the family itself was involved in textile manufacturing in England which no doubt was the origin of their wealth...

One might not suspect it, but what looks from the outside as a very small sliver of land on which the castle is built opens up to a very large Victorian style garden!

Source

While I did not enter the Abbey myself, even from the outside one can just sit near the lake a bit and enjoy the beauty of this place and dream of another world...

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