Kylemore Abbey

This was a stop a ways out of Galway, but one of my favorite stops on the whole tour!

It’s a beautiful castle (and walled Victorian gardens that still make produce they use in the restaurant on site) nestled in a mountain on a lake in the Connemara region of Ireland, famous for it’s stunning landscapes, and of course, Connemara marble.

That said, there was, at a time, quite a lot of resources in Kylemore. The British aristocracy had their time here, but like much of Irish history, the history of the Abbey contains quite a bit of textile arts and even more tragedy.

The castle was originally built by Mitchell Henry, said British aristocrat, who bought the area after honeymooning there with his wife, Irish heiress Margaret Vaughan (which I learned didn’t mean old money, like we think of an heiress today. She was the oldest daughter of a notable family that could use her family’s crest and coat of arms).

And like so many notable women in history, most retellings will only tell you that Margaret gave birth to nine children and died of typhoid fever on a family trip to Egypt (because that’s all women do, right? Bare children and die…). However, we learned Margaret was beloved by the Kylemore residents. She looked after them in part by kick-starting the crochet cottage industry in the region (and this was after the potato-famine popularity!). I don’t know if they we’re replicas, but this part of Margaret’s story did make an appearance in the castle.

Amazing, right? Well, after Margaret died, Henry became miserable and could not keep up the profits necessary to run an estate like Kylemore. He ended up selling it to William Montague, Duke of Manchester, who had recently married Helena Zimmerman, an American heiress (as we know it. Old money).

They updated the house for lavish entertaining that was popular at the time. However, the Duke married an heiress because, like many other European nobility at the time, he was dead broke. They were both pretty big partiers, but he had a particular love of gambling. They ended up having to sell the Kylemore estate as well when it became beyond their means. It ended up with the Benedictine Order, who are still there today.

The storied history is great, but you got to go for the views, both in the castle and chapel and out on the gardens and grounds. It felt like walking through a fairy tale. I would love to go again!