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From Dublin: Connemara and Galway Bay Day Tour
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From €149 per person
Most day tours from Dublin to Connemara go by coach all the way. This one does it differently - you take the InterCity train from Heuston Station, departing at 07:30 and arriving in Galway where a coach is waiting to take you west into one of Ireland’s wildest and most beautiful regions.
The route heads up through Connemara National Park to Leenane on the shores of Killary Harbour, Ireland’s only true fjord. From there it’s on to Kylemore Abbey, the Gothic Revival castle on the edge of a mountain lake, with its restored Victorian walled garden. There’s time to visit the visitor centre and have lunch here before the coach moves on through the Inagh Valley, with the Twelve Bens mountain range on one side and the Maamturks on the other. The landscape in this part of the country is genuinely extraordinary - open bog, glittering loughs, and mountains that seem to change colour as the light shifts.
The return route comes back along the northern shores of Galway Bay before you pick up the train back to Dublin Heuston, arriving around 21:00.
Tours run Monday to Saturday. All admission fees and transfers are included. Meals are at your own expense.
Kylemore Abbey has a café and a restaurant, so that’s your best bet for lunch on the day. The walled garden is worth the time even if the abbey itself feels like a crowd - the Victorian kitchen garden section is the quieter part and gives you a genuine sense of the scale of the original estate.
The Inagh Valley section of the drive is where the landscape is at its most dramatic. The Twelve Bens rise on your left and the Maamturks on your right - keep your eyes up and not on your phone for this stretch, because the light on the bog changes fast and the mountains look different every few minutes.
If you have a window seat on the return train from Galway, the journey along the edge of Galway Bay in the evening light is one of the better train views in Ireland. The water is close and the light comes off it in a way that makes even regular commuters look up.
The 07:30 train from Heuston means an early start. Eat breakfast before you leave rather than relying on the station options. The train itself takes around two hours, which is plenty of time to settle in before the coach day begins.
On the coach route out of Galway: the N59 west passes through Oughterard - the last proper village before Connemara opens up. It sits on the western shore of Lough Corrib, the second-largest lake in Ireland, with Aughnanure Castle three kilometres east on the shore (an O’Flaherty tower house built around 1500, managed by the OPW and worth the stop if you have time). The village itself is an angling town; the walls of Conn’s pub are covered in photographs of brown trout pulled from the Owenriff River.
At Letterfrack and Kylemore: Letterfrack is the village at the gate of Connemara National Park, and the Diamond Hill upper loop starts from the car park here - a 7km circuit to 442 metres, with Killary Harbour and the Twelve Bens all around at the summit. The tour visits Kylemore Abbey, which is twelve kilometres west of Letterfrack on Pollanabawn Lake. Mitchell Henry built it as a Gothic Revival castle for his wife in 1868; she died six years later and the Benedictine sisters have had it since 1920. The walk around the lake is the better experience; the interior is less interesting than the exterior.
If you have any time in Galway before or after the train, the medieval core is a ten-minute walk from the station. Shop Street narrows into laneways worth turning down at random. Tigh Coili on Mainguard Street runs a trad session nightly - the standard is serious, not for show. Ard Bia at Nimmo on Quay Street does a locally-led menu that changes with the market. The Claddagh neighbourhood - the old fishing village the city absorbed - is a twenty-minute loop from the station via the Long Walk, which is the best short route in Galway.