Journey to the past

Lifestyle – Visitors’ impressions of Galway and its people from 1840 to 1940 are explored in this year’s Galway’s Great Reads, a celebration organised by the local public libraries. JUDY MURPHY hears about a series of events examining a century of travel writing about the area and learns about a couple who were captivated by this ‘exotic’ place on a tour before the Great Famine.

An observation in a travel book about Conamara being overrun with ‘mobs of tourists’, might strike a chord with people who’ve witnessed the number of visitors travelling West in recent years.

What’s surprising is that comment wasn’t made recently. In fact, it was recorded in the early 1840s when travel writers Samuel Carter Hall and Anna Maria Hall toured Ireland for a three-volume travel series, entitled Ireland: Its Scenery, Character etc.

The husband-and-wife team, who made their living out of creating guidebooks, were among the earliest promoters of tourism in Ireland and this beautifully illustrated guide provides a social and cultural history of the 32 counties as well as describing the landscape through which they travelled. They hoped to make English people more aware of Ireland as a tourist destination – ‘to render Ireland more advantageously known to England’ – while ensuring that the Union of Great Britain and Ireland remained strong.

The Halls’ observations on Galway and the illustrations by leading artists that accompanied their writings, are being explored in this year’s Galway’s Great Read, an annual event organised by Galway Public Libraries.

The theme of the 2021 Great Read is Westward Ho: A Ramble through Galway, 1840-1940. Also on the menu is the 1867 book, Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands: With Notices of Lough Mask, written by the famous surgeon and antiquarian Sir William Wilde, who built Moytura Lodge in Cong as a holiday home and, later, a fishing lodge at Illaunroe near Leenane.

The Corrib County, by 20th century travel writer and film-maker Richard Hayward illustrated by J Humbert Craig, published in 1943, is up for discussion too. Hayward, who died in 1964, was a prolific travel writer whose other books include Connacht and the City of Galway (1952).

The aim of the annual Great Read is to promote Galway’s culture via its literary heritage and history, as organisers, Acting Senior Executive Librarian, Josephine Vahey, and archivist, Patria McWalter, explain.

Galway’s first Great Read was held in 2013 as part of the Decade of Commemoration, marking the centenary of Irish independence.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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