Walking Cong: the abbey, the fishing house and the Guinness woods

You can walk everything in Cong that is free and everything that is actually old in about three hours, and you never need the car. This is the route, in the order that works.

Start at the abbey gate on Abbey Street

Cong Abbey is a state-owned national monument in the care of the Office of Public Works. There is no ticket, no gate and no opening hours: it is an open site in the middle of the village. What survives from the twelfth-century Augustinian house is the north and south walls and the east gable of the church, and the north-east corner of the cloister; the Office of Public Works is explicit that most of the rest is later reconstruction, much of it funded by Benjamin Guinness in 1855. Give the carved doorways time. They are the reason to be here rather than the general picturesqueness.

The Office of Public Works also lists this as an unguided site and asks visitors to take care, which in practice means uneven stone, steps with no handrail and grass that holds water. Boots rather than trainers, particularly between October and April.

Keep going to the Monks' Fishing House

Most visitors turn back at the cloister. Do not. Walk through it, follow the yew walk, and a couple of minutes on you come to a small roofless stone building standing out over the Cong River on its own pier. The Office of Public Works puts it about 90 metres west of the abbey. It has a narrow opening cut through the floor so a line or a net could be worked from inside, and the outline of a fireplace in the west gable. It is part of the same national monument and it is the best thing in Cong.

The story people tell is that a cord ran from the hut up to the abbey kitchen so a bell rang when a salmon was taken. It is a good story. The Office of Public Works does not claim it, so take it as village lore rather than history.

Cross the bridge into the Guinness woods

A few metres beyond the fishing house a footbridge takes you over the river and into Coillte's Cong Forest. This is where the walk stops being medieval and becomes Victorian. The trees are a Guinness planting from the Ashford estate years, which is why a wood on the Galway side of the river has coast redwoods and giant sequoia standing in it, and the paths are the private tracks the family cut so they could cross their own land without using public roads.

Coillte's marked Cong Nature Trail is 2.3 km and takes about an hour. Sport Ireland's national trail register lists the same route as 1.3 km with 20 metres of ascent, which is a straight disagreement between two official sources; we have used the landowner's figure. Either way it is flat, the forest roads are wide and unsurfaced, and the ground is wet most of the year. Dogs are allowed on a lead under both listings.

Two features are worth detouring for. The Guinness Tower, a stone watchtower of roughly twenty metres, sits just off the loop to the south. And the limestone underneath the whole wood is full of holes: Teach Aille, a sink on the trail said locally to have been a monks' store, and further west the Pigeon Hole, a collapsed cavern with stone steps down to the underground stream carrying Lough Mask water to Lough Corrib. The Pigeon Hole is gated for safety. Look down into it, do not go into it, and note that it is on the County Galway side of the boundary even though it is a fifteen-minute walk from a Mayo village.

Finish on the canal

Come back into the village and go out the northern side, from the large free car park, to pick up the Dry Canal. The Commissioners of Public Works dug this five-kilometre channel between 1848 and 1854 to connect Lough Mask to Lough Corrib, abandoned the navigation half of the scheme in 1854 and told their engineer to finish only what the drainage needed. The village has called it the Dry Canal ever since. Locks, bridges and dressed stone survive along it.

The name only half holds. The water level in the channel runs between nothing in summer and about three and a half metres in winter, so a January walk and a July walk show you two different things. If you want to see it as a canal rather than a ditch, come in the dark half of the year.

If you want more

The forest route on to Clonbur is 12 km return and about three and a half hours on the same estate tracks, and it crosses into County Galway partway along. From there the ridge to the summit of Mount Gable opens the view back over the head of Lough Corrib to Connemara. That is a different sort of day and needs proper footwear, a map and a look at the forecast.