Plan Your Trip
Additional Resources for Anglers Planning Travel to Connemara.
Recommended reading
Guidebooks
There are a lot of them, and even the worst is fun to read prior to your first trip to Ireland. But, unless you need the latest breaking news and up-to-the minute prices, buying used guidebooks from Amazon or a second-hand bookshop will save you a lot of money. Ireland is an ancient land with a civilization that pre-dates Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, so why worry if most of your guidebooks are a few years out of date?
The Rough Guide to Ireland | Rough Guides
www.roughguide.com
Comprehensive, accurate, well-organized and well-written. This is one of the best, so it is worth buying the most current edition available.
Foder's Ireland | Foder's Travel Publications
www.fodors.com
Exhaustive and encyclopedic in detail. It's not exactly light reading, but a very useful reference.
National Geographic Traveler | National Geographic Society, Washington, DC
A first-class guide with an especially intelligent treatment of Irish history. Excellent maps (no surprise – it's National Geographic) and great photos. The coverage of places to see in Dublin is one of the best. While otherwise not particularly comprehensive, it covers everything a visitor needs to know for a two week stay.
Backroads Ireland | Dorling Kindersley Ltd., London, England
Complete descriptions and outstanding maps for 25 highly recommend driving tours in Ireland. Great photographs and a free, but adequate, pullout map. If you're planning a grand tour of the island, this guidebook is required reading.
The Unofficial Guide to Ireland | John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ
This is a lightweight guide with a clever title. Most of the guide is composed of reviews and ratings of attractions, lodging and restaurants, which might serve as a useful checklist when planning our travel itinerary.
Foder's See It Ireland | Foder's Travel Publications
www.fodors.com
A very nicely illustrated running narrative of interesting places to visit. Nice photos and maps of recommended driving tours. The material about Irish history is concise and well done, too.
Ricks Steves' Ireland | Avalon Travel
www.ricksteves.com
Worth a read, especially if you like Rick Steves' TV shows, but we do find it is a little light in content for visiting Connemara – it really only covers the more common Ireland tours and hot spots.
Alastair Sawday's Special Places To Stay: Ireland
Alastair Sawday Publishing Co. Ltd., Bristol, England
Comprehensive, carefully researched, highly descriptive and very well-written reviews of over 200 wonderful country houses, manors, historic hotels, and upscale cottages and bed and breakfasts. This has become our bible for finding new places to stay, and if Sawday were to recommend a yurt on a remote Mongolian plain, we'd probably give it a try!
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Fishing Books
Matching the Hatch | Pat O'Reilly, author
Swan Hill Press, Shrewsbury, England
This is one of the few guides to hatching insects and their imitations for rivers and lakes in the British Isles and the Republic of Ireland. The book is organized by insect type and emergence sequence – and the photos are excellent. The only problem for a North American fly angler is making sense of some of the colloquial insect names. But, their Latin names are also provided, and that's where the internet comes in handy!
Rivers of Ireland, A Fly Fisher's Guide, 5th Edition | Peter O'Reilly, author
Merlin Unwind Books', Shropshire, England
Peter O'Reilly is one of Ireland's most respected fly anglers – and the island's most prolific writer of fly-fishing books. This one is comprehensive and engagingly written – but very difficult to find in the United States. We purchased our copy in Ireland, where it cost almost $50. But, the information is invaluable – and you're getting it from the original, and only, source. O'Reilley has an equally detailed book about Irish lakes, which we have not read in its entirety.
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Maps
We've found that the best maps for fishing are the "Irish Discovery Series" maps. They show all the rivers and lakes, all roads – both big and small, as well as elevations and other useful information to anglers. They come as a numbered group – so select the map in the region you will be fishing. For Connemara, maps #37, 38, 44 and 45 cover the region. Discovery maps can be purchased online here:
Or you can purchase them while in Ireland at any number of shops. You can also purchase a book that contains all the regions in one bound version which is handy if you plan to fish several regions of Ireland beyond Connemara.
For Traveling Around By Car
The best reference is "The Official Road Atlas of Ireland", also published by the Ordinance Survey Ireland. It's so detailed it even shows the locations of the Garda's speed detection zones.
AA Route Planner
Another road resource – which we recommend especially during the planning stages of your Irish trip – is Ireland's equivalent to "AAA Route Maps" in the United States. It is an online resource that can be found here: AA Route Planner. Just enter in where you would like to go and it will show you the shortest routes, the duration and even how much fuel it will take to get there. You can elect to avoid motorways, which is also nice for the tourist - since the motorways will be much less scenic.