Fernwood farm and Ballynahinch Castle provide twice the joy in and around gorgeous Co Galway
Lucy White headed west for a relaxing trip to Ballynahinch
Abundance. A word that almost becomes a mantra as I rove, firstly, around Fernwood – Clifden’s 150-acre organic farm where I stay for two nights – and then Ballynahinch Castle Hotel, whose majestic estate sprawls over 700 acres and is minded by the monumental Twelve Bens.
The Connemara landscape is famous for its “savage beauty” (Oscar Wilde); white knuckles of karst, glassy loughs, blanket bogs, tapestries of purple moor grass and yellow gorse, stocky native ponies, networks of dry-stone walls and a sky as widescreen as in any spaghetti western.