The thoughts and life of me

We had a gorgeous sunny day and decided to use some of it to see some sites nearby. First stop was Castle Hacket, the castle in the photo above. Wikipedia writes about the castle that:

“Castle Hacket is a 13th-century tower house located at the base of Knockma hill six miles southeast of Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. It was built by the Hacketts, a Norman family. The Kirwans, one of the tribes of Galway, settled there in the 15th century. The Castle Hackett branch of the family was established in the mid-17th century by Sir John Kirwan. The castle was abandoned in the 18th century and the Kirwans built a new three-story house called Castlehacket which was burned in 1923 during the Civil War but rebuilt and still stands today.

In the introduction to his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), William Butler Yeats mentions the family and castle Hackett; he writes, “Each county has usually some family, or personage, supposed to have been favoured or plagued [with fairy-seeing abilities], especially by the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for their ancestor a fairy…”

The area around is a lovely spot for going walking or running on a sunny day, and for those who like that sort of thing it’s probably nice in rain too. We went for a small walk as we had other things on our programme for the rest of that day.

There were loads of nice yellow buttercups and other flowers in bloom and with birds singing, the sun shining, people smiling and greeting each other as if they knew them, it made the atmosphere almost magic.

Afterwards we drove to Lough Corrib, Ireland’s second largest lake in Ireland. Last time I went over we also went dow, but then the lake was a nice misty mystery. It was almost unrecognisable now in the sunshine.

The fresh air did us all very good and there was a gentle breeze  by the lake that felt really invigorating. Even though we where the only humans at the pier, there where others that was also enjoying the lake in the sunshine.