Béal Chláir · Co. Galway
A one-pub farming village on the Tuam-Headford road - and the gateway to Knockma, the hill where the fairy king is said to hold court.
Belclare is a small parish village on the R333, three and a half miles south-south-west of Tuam on the road to Headford. It is laid out simply: the Church of the Sacred Heart on one side of the road, the turlough on the other. The Irish name, Béal Chláir, is the mouth of the clár - the plain - and the clár is that turlough, a seasonal lake that floods the flat ground in winter and drains to grass in summer. The village proper is a couple of hundred people; the parish around it is wider farming country.
It is not a tourist village in itself. There is a primary school, a community centre, a GAA pitch, a playground, and Canavan's - the pub that is also the shop and the post office. A Franciscan friary was founded in the parish in 1291, though little of the record survives. The village sits inside the civil and Catholic parish of Corofin, and its football is played under the Corofin name - the club that won five All-Ireland Senior Club titles and was the first to take three in a row.
The reason to come is the hill. Two kilometres west, Knockma rises out of the plain - also called Castle Hackett hill - and on it sits one of the better short walks in north Galway, wrapped in some of the best-known fairy lore in Connacht. At its foot stands Castle Hackett, a 13th-century Norman tower house built by the Anglo-Norman Hacketts and later held by the Kirwans. From the cairns on the summit the view runs over the whole flat green sweep of east Galway.
Use Belclare as it is meant to be used: park at Knockma, walk the loop, and come back down to Canavan's for a pint. Tuam is ten minutes north for a proper town; Headford and Lough Corrib are south. Belclare itself you pass through in a minute - but the hill above it has held people's imaginations for a few thousand years.
