DAY 7 - LEENANE

In the morning we took a boat trip up Killary Fjord.  KiIlary claims to have the only fjord in Ireland although Wikipedia adds Carlingford Lough and Lough Swilly. The dock for the ferry was about 2 kilometres down the road and left in plenty of time to be sure to get on.  A coach tour arrived so they had quite a good load on board.  The trip takes about one and a half hours and reaches the entrance on the Atlantic Ocean.  Aquaculture has become a big industry in recent years and we passed a very large number of buoys to which are attached long ropes on which mussels grow.  It takes about one and a half years for the mussels to become fully grown as food.  The buoys are all strung together in long lines.  Mussels were always on the local menu.  There is also a farmed salmon industry where they start the salmon off in fresh water lakes and transfer them into circular pens near the entrance to the harbour.


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Close up of the buoys

Harvesting the mussels

After the trip we walked back into the village and visited the Sheep and Wool Centre.  This consists of a shop, a cafe and a small museum.  The museum had an active sheep farmer present to tell us all wanted to know about the local industry.  It was a pity that very few took the opportunity to come into the museum as outside there were always plenty of visitors.  We learned about the over twenty varieties of sheep in the region although the most common by far was the Scottish Black Face and we saw lots of those on our travels.  We learned the difference between wool and worsted.

In a Nutshell: "Woolen", basically means that the individual fibers of varying lengths are going in many different directions, overlapping each other at a variety of angles and leaving air spaces between the individual fibres. To achieve this the wool is carded with a comb and then rolled up into a cylinder and the wool is pulled out of the cylinder and spun. "Worsted" means that the individual fibers are roughly the same length and are running parallel to each other and only overlapping at the tips, leaving little to no space between the individual fibres and then spun pulling fibres from the end.

We also saw a  number of examples of knitting patterns and we had seen some of these on Inishmore which is known for its rugged chunky sweaters.

Examples of knitting styles

The VIllage of Leenane. 

In this photo there is a pub called The Field recognising that a film of the same name we shot in Leenane some years ago.  The lead actors were Richard Harris and John Hurt.  When we got back to the B and B there were a set of cases and bags waiting for their owners.  This was a group of five men who were on a walking holiday following the route were were walking with Hillwalk.  Four were from Belgium and one from France.  They were one day behind at this point.