islands connemara

When stately Buck Mulligan stepped out of the pages of Joyce's Ulysses he was a character immortalised in a great work, but the flesh and blood person who inspired that character was, himself, a Renaissance man of no mean achievement. Oliver St. John Gogarty was an accomplished surgeon, a poet praised by no less a person than Yeats, and a wit who held court in true Oscar Wilde fashion at his homes in Dublin and in his beloved retreats at Renvyle House and Heather Island in Connemara....

Its many archaeological sites are evidence of a once thriving community which was devastated by famine. See a church buried in sand, a celtic well, the Hill of the Woman and ancient kitchen middens, recent archaeological excavations....