There is a wild land west of the Shannon to which the English banished the rebel lords of Ireland. Here on the same stormy shores where Irish monks earlier preserved the light of civilization through Europe's Dark Ages, the noble Irish preserved their ancient language and high culture.

Today, not only are the language and culture of the Irish preserved in Connemara, but also a traditional way of life in which the whole family works together to win a living from the land and sea at a variety of tasks which change with the seasons.

The air is clear and the water pure in Connemara because the people live in harmony with nature and do not take more from the land than the land gives willingly. They are self-reliant people who use local resources and the traditional skills perfected by their ancestors, and are content with lives of hard work and simple pleasures. They live with the wind and the rain, but the sunshine between fills their their sky with rainbows.

Ireland rolls west from Dublin in gentle green waves that are graphed into prosperous farms. But westward of Galway town, the land rumples up and gets rocky, and the lush green pastures on limestone give way to bog on granite bedrock. The road becomes a ribbon of tarmac on top of the quaking bog, meandering between lakes and sharp, shining mountains. Beside it a procession to tipsy telephone poles, blown to odd angles by the Atlantic gales, reel to the horizon.

Wild horses crop the sweet grass on the shoulders of the road, and sheep tuft the mountain sides. Overhead the swans fly by.

This is Connemara, the western third of County Galway, in the Province of Connacht, in the Republic of Ireland. This storm-battered land of lakes, bogs, mountains, and intricately indented rocky coast, is the Celtic fringe of Europe.

Wanderlust is in the blood of the Celts and the map of human history swirls with the currents of their migrations and conquests.

The Celts were never able to unite against their common enemies and eventually all that was left of their ancient domain which, before the raise of the Roman Empire, had stretched from Turkey to Ireland, was the Atlantic fringe of Europe; Galicia in Spain, Brittany in France, and Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The traditional Celtic culture is best preserved in Connemara on the Atlantic coast of Ireland.

Connemara was once the ancient kingdom of the O'Kellys. After the Normans conquered the east of County Galway in the 1200's, Connemara, the wild west of bogs and mountains and rocky shores, was conceded to the O'Flaherties, who the Normans could not conquer. The O’Flaherties ruled Connemara until the coming of Cromwell’s army, which ravaged then occupied Galway in 1652. And it was Cromwell who sent the Irish nobility “to Hell or Connaught,” west of the Shannon. In 1700, the Martin family of Galway town obtained a 300-square mile estate in Connemara, making theirs the largest private landholding in the British Isles. ‘Humanity Dick’ Martin, considered an eccentric in his day, founded the RSPCA.

The terrible potato famine bankrupted the Martin estate and it was sold for debts in 1850. The rocky land around the southern coast had so little attraction for landlords that the tenants were able to buy their small farms, and it is on these family farms of Connemara that the precious heritage of the Irish language and culture have been preserved.