Thursday 17th August 2017 – Achill Island to Sligo

A cooked breakfast with our accommodation before we set off this morning. Not sure what it was about last night's accommodation but it was missing something. Everything was OK but it had no soul or something.

First stop today was another National Park, Ballycroy. Beautiful headquarters overlooking the countryside with quite an interesting display on the local area. The building was partially funded by the European community.  We went for about a twenty-minute walk around the hillside behind the headquarters. Not a tree in site. A bit different to our national parks that are usually in wooded areas. We also had a coffee and some delicious chocolate almond cake.

Ballycrow National Park

 Ballycroy National Park is one of the largest expanses of peatland in Europe, consisting of 117.79 square kilometres of Atlantic blanket bog. It is a unique habitat with a diverse flora and fauna. It was established as a national park on 1 November 1998. 

From here we headed to Bangor and Ballina. Stopped in Ballina for a walk around a park. We were hopeful that we may see some salmon in the rivers. It's their territory and that time of year but no luck.

From Ballina, we drove on to the Megalithic Cemetery at Carrowmore, a fascinating place.

This megalithic cemetery is the largest in Ireland and amongst the oldest in Europe. Built around 4600-3900 BC. There were originally over 80 monuments on this site including chamber tombs, ring forts, cairns and passage graves. 

There are about 30 sites still worth visiting. Most impressive was the Central Tomb, also known as Listoghil. The tomb stands on the highest point of the Carrowmore complex, the only tomb definitely covered by a cairn and also the largest in the cemetery, the cairn is 34 metres in diameter.

Tonight we are booked in at Harbour House, a hostel in Sligo. We chose to arrive early so that we could get our laundry done but they were too busy to do it. One x against the establishment. It took us quite some time to find a laundromat/laundry the first two listed on Google being closed. Eventually, we found one open that will have it done for pick up in the morning.

Sligo

From the hostel, we went for a walk into Sligo. Quite a pretty spot on the Garavogue River – lots of rushing water. Back to the hostel to cook our own dinner (pasta and tuna). Very quiet here, quite different to the other hostels we've been in. At first, we thought our room a bit claustrophobic with no windows and only a skylight. We asked the girl at the desk to open the skylight however and that made all the difference. Took the rooms rating from a 4 to an 8 out of 10.