Go Walk: Garryland Woods, Co Galway

You’ve probably heard of Coole Park, the former home of Lady Gregory and setting of WB Yeats poems. But you might not have heard of Garryland, near Kinvara, which is where Yeats’s hipster cousin might have hung out: it’s just around the corner but way less visited and much harder to find.

The interconnected Coole-Garryland complex must be one of Ireland’s richest nature reserves, with 400 hectares of woodland, turlough, limestone pavement and grassland. But the Garryland side sees little footfall.

Leaving the Garryland car park, the woods along the trail are rich with hazel and ash. These are often found together on limestone, and thrive here on the lowlands east of the Burren. I recently heard a local farmer say there’s no place on earth like the Burren in spring and here you can sense its presence in the trees, wildflowers and rock.

An old building, just after you enter the wood, is used as a summer roost by lesser horseshoe bats. There’s also a specially built hibernaculum, an underground chamber for the bats to hibernate in during winter.

We followed a trail to a dead end, then continued on into the woods. Two startled hares bounced noisily through the undergrowth. All along, the trails were spotted with the scat of pine marten. The air was so warm and sticky, it felt more like primordial jungle than an Irish woodland: bugs attacked my neck, and the wind dropped to nothing.

We took a path down to the dry grassy bed of a turlough. These “disappearing lakes”, fed by groundwater during wet weather, are interwoven with the forests, stretching their watery fingers deep into the woods. Nowhere else in Ireland are turloughs so closely associated with old woodland.

We passed a grove of oaks and one old yew, then rested on a rock in a clearing. “It looks like something out of Jurassic Park,” my walking buddy said, staring at the scene in front of us: a small turlough, surrounded by a grassy savannah dotted with boulders.

I could see what she meant: it looked so green and primeval we half expected a Brachiosaurus to emerge from behind the hawthorns.

But when the turloughs rise in wet weather, the trails flood. You won’t get far if you come here in mid-winter, so visit in summer during a dry spell.

The full linear walk from the Garryland car park to Coole is almost 5km one-way, and you could make this much longer by exploring different side-paths. This is what makes Coole-Garryland so special: there are few other places in Ireland where you can spend so long exploring woodland.

But the swampiness of the day seemed to call for a lazier approach. We turned back, then took a different trail to another turlough fringed by steep limestone crags. Tired and thirsty, we walked back to the car park in the still heat.