Coill Ua bhFiachrach isn’t a place you can drive to and park at. It’s the old Gaelic name for the territory around Kinvara – the ‘wood of the Uí Fiachrach’ – and the district the Ó hEidhin, the Hynes clan, ruled from about the 10th century to the mid-17th. The name had largely dropped out of everyday use by the time the scholar John O’Donovan wrote it down in his Ordnance Survey letters in the 1830s, but it still maps almost exactly onto the modern civil parish of Kinvara, the northern part of the barony of Kiltartan in south County Galway.
So there’s no gate, no visitor centre, no admission. What you actually come to see is Kinvara and its castle. If you have an afternoon, the honest plan is the village harbour, a walk along the bay, and a look at Dunguaire Castle – from the outside, because the castle itself has been closed since 2023.
The Hynes clan
The Ó hEidhin were chiefs here for the guts of seven centuries, holding the ground between the limestone of the Burren to the west and the Slieve Aughty hills to the east. That wider lordship was Uí Fiachrach Aidhne; Coill Ua bhFiachrach was its northern, Kinvara-facing part. O’Donovan’s 19th-century survey, drawing on his book on the genealogies and customs of the Hy-Fiachrach, is the reason the old boundaries are recorded at all.
Dunguaire Castle
Dunguaire Castle is the clan’s surviving monument: a tower house built around 1520 by the O’Hynes on a rocky spit on the south-eastern shore of Galway Bay, just outside Kinvara. The name comes from Dún Guaire, the fort of Guaire – Guaire Aidne mac Colmáin, the 7th-century king of Connacht remembered in legend for his open-handedness. The 23-metre (75-foot) tower and its bawn wall were restored in the 1980s.
Its second life was literary. The poet and surgeon Oliver St John Gogarty bought Dunguaire in 1924 and restored it, and it became a meeting place for the Celtic Revival – W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Lady Gregory among the visitors. It later ran as a tourist attraction with summer medieval banquets, but it has been closed since 2023, with Galway County Council looking after the building. Check its current status before you build a trip around it; for now the view from the shore and the road is what’s on offer, and it’s a good one at dusk.
Kinvara and getting there
Kinvara sits at the foot of the castle: a small fishing village with a working harbour and a handful of pubs, on the R438 off the N67 near Gort. It’s about two and a half hours from Dublin by the M6, and roughly 40 minutes from Galway City, with a limited bus service from the city if you’re not driving. The village has cafés, shops and toilets, and the coast road on towards Kilcolgan gives you the bay at its best on a clear evening.