Day One

To Oughterard
Last autumn, having just quit my job, I needed to get into the countryside to clear my head. Living as I did at the time in Galway City the obvious destination was west, into Connemara – Ireland’s land of mountains and water. So, I gathered up my walking gear and hitched on a whim from Galway to Oughterard, the starting point of the Western Way. This trail brings you through Galway into Mayo and eventually -- if you have enough boot leather -- up into Donegal. I devised a sudden plan to walk the trail until it reached Westport in Mayo, a three-day hike.

Oughterard is an unremarkable little Irish farming town, though there are plenty of pubs, restaurants and B+B’s. I bought some supplies there, walked about a bit, and spent the night in the Lough Corrib Hostel.

Day Two

Oughterard to Maam Cross
I set out on a dull, overcast Irish morning. It was, however, a dry day and this proved to be fortunate, because most of the first section of the Western Way meandered across bogland. I wore my waterproof boots and my quick-drying techo-fabric trail pants, but I still stumbled wet and dirty out of the bog.

The trail started innocuously enough, following a small road up into the hills surrounding Oughterard, and then down along the shore of Lough Corrib. I met very little traffic, and no other walkers, along this stretch of the route, which was undemanding in terms both of effort and panorama.

About an hour-and-a-half out of Oughterard, the trail left the road and entered a State Forest of imported pines and spruces. Grand so far, but the forest didn’t extend too far: the trail quickly brought me to a path than tentatively followed the north-west shore of Lough Corrib for a good five miles across land that one would charitably term damp. I walked it after a week of blazing autumnal sunshine, and I still found myself splashing about far too much. This is not a trail I would advise anyone to attempt during Ireland’s notoriously wet winters and springs. Unless you can swim.

The land I walked that day hid under scrawny grass; only where it was being harvested for turf does it reveal its brown constitution. I discovered that I do not like walking bogs: too much attention has to be paid to precisely placing your next footfall, and the surrounding landscape becomes an incidental detail. But, if you like a challenge, or need to lumber up for a bout of naked mud wrestling, here are some tips I pass on in the hope that you leave the bog less covered in muck than I did.

Fortunately, the bog didn’t last forever; two hours of careful walking brought me out. Then I was back on dry land. Sort of. In fact, the trail led onto a hard, metalled road curving through vetch-brown bog, where families where working to gather the turf for their winter fires.

This road eventually led onto the main road running between the villages of Maum and Maam Cross. According to my guidebook, the trail up ahead once again left the road and ran across more bog. The guidebook indicated that it didn’t even come close to a town or village with might provide accommodation for the night. Since I didn’t have a tent, and desperately needed a shower, I decided to leave the Western Way for that day, at least. Hitching to Maam Cross, I stayed in the hostel there. If you decide to do this, bring a book because there is nothing in Maam Cross except the hostel and a pub/restaurant/gift shop which was a bit dead on that particular weeknight.

Day Three

Maam Cross to Roscoe
It was raining the following morning. I decided to skip stage two of the Western Way, not relishing the prospect of slogging through even wetter bog. Instead, I hitched to Clifden and, after a hearty breakfast and some reprovisioning, hitched north to Leenane.

I arrived there in the early afternoon (it is where I would have ended up at the end of the second day of the trail, anyway, if I had been walking). It’s a tiny village, built around the turnoff for the road to Westport. There is one hostel nearby, the Killary Harbour Youth Hostel, which lies at the end of Ireland’s largest, deepest and -- I suspect -- only natural Fjord.

There are two ways to approach the hostel. The first is by road, walking beside Lough Fee. The second is via the Killary Harbour Trail. I took this second route; it has existed unofficially for years but was recently incorporated into Slí na Chonamara, the Connemara Way. It’s a wonderful trail, with great views and great walking. It started innocently enough along a metalled road through bog, then ran through farmland until it petered out to a trail carved out only by feet (human and ovine), running precipitously above the south rim of the fjord. There were some hairy bits where I had to be really careful, but these were few. Mostly it was just me, the sheep and the spectacular scenery: Ireland's Atlantic coast is rugged, and nowhere more so than here, where the Atlantic has made a dagger-cut five miles into the country.

The weather -- which had turned sunny around midday -- became more inclement with the evening, until I was walking in a spiteful summer storm, half-blinded by sea-smelling rain. And I loved it: high above the hard sea, among gray serrated mountains, soaking wet, I felt my worries slip away as I found what I had come looking for: wildness, which is truly rare in Ireland.

The trail ran out to nothing about a half-mile before the end of the fjord, so I followed a low stone wall through a farmer's barren field until I came to a small road. Turning left, I came to the hostel -- which is the last building in the village of Roscoe – in less than a minute. The hostel is located in an old school building and is functional, at best. Still, the dining room has huge windows that make a landscape of the view (looking out to sea) and the common room has comfortable couches and an open fire. Plus, the showers are hot and powerful.