Some Great Irish Roads - a series by Bob Montgomery.
It would be hard to imagine a more perfect drive through spectacular Irish landscape than the road which takes you from Louisburg, beside Clew Bay, to Leenaun, at the head of spectacular Killary Harbour.
This road has everything. Spectacular mountains and lakes, a landscape little touched by human hands (the R335 itself is almost the only sign of human intervention) and a series of ever-more spectacular vistas.
The road offers a driving experience which will live long in the memory.
Louisburg's Irish name is Cluain Cearbán meaning 'meadow of buttercups' but it was renamed by the Marquess of Sligo to honour an uncle who had played a significant part in the capture in 1758 of the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.
It's a pretty town, much of it having been laid out in the 18th century and a good starting place for our journey.
From Louisburg, turn on to the R335 signposted for Leenaun and Delphi.
On your left, Ireland's holy mountain, Croagh Patrick, rises some 762 metres, while ahead the landscape is flush with yellow gorse and in the distance rise the Sheeffrey Hills (climbing to an identical 762 metres ) and the Mweelrea Mountains which have as their highest point Mweelrea at 814 metres.
After some 10 kilometres, Doo Lough and the smaller Glencullen Lough are reached and the road drops down beside the eastern shore of the lake.
Here is a poignant Famine cross remembering the hungry poor who walked this landscape in the late 1840s as well as those hungry poor who still walk this world today.
This is a spot of spectacular beauty framed by the craggy slopes of Ben Bury to the west of the lough and Barrclashcame which slopes down to the edge of the R335. Near the southern end of the lough is the turn signposted for Cummin which takes you on to the road featured some time ago in the second of this series.
Our path, however, lies south and we head into the Delphi Valley. Delphi is a magical place, so named by the 2nd Marquess of Sligo - who was Byron's traveling companion in Greece - and who built a fishing lodge here in the 1830s. He named it Delphi as it so reminded him of the site of the Oracle at Delphi in Greece.
Close by Delphi is the small Fin Lough which we pass before the road takes us south to the northern side of Killary Harbour.
Killary Harbour, of course, is not a harbour at all but rather a long, narrow inlet that forms Ireland's only real fiord as it winds in from the Atlantic forming a natural border between Mayo and Galway on its way to meet the outflow of the River Erriff.
Its safe deep-water anchorage provides a dark brooding presence as the R335 now follows along its shore towards the village of Leenaun just south of the inlet's tip on the Galway side.
This is a truly spectacular drive which will linger long in the memory calling you back.
Allow plenty of time when you travel it to soak up its grandeur and isolation - made accessible by the R335.