The Killary, as it’s known to the locals is the only fjord in Ireland and was gouged out of the rock by the glaciers of the last ice-age. The town of Leenane is close by, where the film The Field was made, and I suspect they are still living on the merits of it.

The Connemara Princess, a state of the art catamaran will take you on a most enchanting ninety-minute tour of this fjord, complete with commentary, video and very pleasant food and drink. Along the way, sheer cliffs drop to unimaginable depths while sheep cling impossibly to the precipice. Terns plunge into the slate grey surface of the fjord, to surface, most times triumphantly, with fish in their beaks.

On the far shore, the remains of lazy beds can be seen from famine times, where potatoes were grown, their nutrition gained by the back-breaking labour of trailing seaweed from the shoreline up onto the slopes. Until a tax was levied on it. Lazy beds? A misnomer if ever there was one.

Apparently during the last war, there was a great storm off this coast and in order to take shelter, two submarines patrolling the Atlantic, put into the Killary. The only problem was that one was British and one was German. And Eire was neutral. In order to avoid what could have been an international incident, the Government of the Republic ignored them, the submarines ignored each other, and the crews met down the pub for the craic during the three days it took for the storm to blow over! Apparently there was a continuous stream of Arthur Guinness’s dray horses delivering from Clifden. Now that’s what’s called a peace process!
Only problem was afterwards when the storm was over, and they went out into the Atlantic, instead of sinking pints they started sinking each other.

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Every summer treasure seekers come to the west to dive and look for Spanish Doubloons and Pieces of Eight, but apart from the treasure of the Girona which foundered off Port na Spania on the North Coast a month later in the same year, not much has been found. With the underwater currents grinding rocks and timber, all traces of vessels would be long gone.

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Unable to make headway against the wind, on 20 September 1588, three Armada ships had anchored half a league from Connemara’s shore. After five days at anchor, Captain Francisco de Cuellar related afterwards: 'There sprang up so great a storm on our beam, with a sea up to the heavens, so that the cables could not hold...we were driven ashore... Such a thing was never seen; for within the space of an hour two ships were broken to pieces, so that there did not escape three hundred men, and more than one thousand were drowned.'

It was a bad coast then and even today with unpredictable swirling currents and eddies, boats keep well out from the shore.

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