Brigit's Garden
A non-commercial take on the Santa Experience
Pretty much every time we hit the N95 out of Galway headed west, we make a detour at Roscahill, turn right off the road and drive for a mile or so, and spend a little time at Brigit’s Garden.
Sometimes it’s just for tea, sometimes for lunch, sometimes for a walk through the 11 acres to slow us down from driving speed to human speed. And nowhere slows you down to human speed, to the speed of nature, quite like the enchanted gardens Jenny Beale created two decades ago.
What Jenny and the garden designer Mary Reynolds established is a series of four gardens reflecting the four seasonal festivals: Samhain; Imbolc; Beltaine; Lughnasa. There are pathways and walkways, stone cottages and glades, trails and little lakes, woodland and standing stones.
The truth about Brigit’s garden, however, is that it is easy to enumerate, but difficult to describe. Above all, it is a peaceful place, even when, as on our last detour, there is a tour bus troop of visitors milling around. No matter: the calm of the garden and the tea rooms is supreme, one of the best examples of forest bathing – or nature bathing – that we know of. Brigit’s Garden is, in effect, a Nature Spa: the garden as idyll, of nature respected and cared for, its magnificence amplified.
The garden is reason to turn off the road, and the café and gift shop are further reasons. Good daytime cooking – celeriac and mushroom soup with sage; lentil dahl with roasted cauliflower; house hot smoked salmon with charred broccoli – are the sort of dishes that suit the mood perfectly. And their events – a non-commercial Santa experience is just the thing parents and kids need to lead up to the big day – are apt and well-conceived.
It’s simply magical, and it’s 5 minutes off the N95.
Staples:
Attyflin Apple Juices
We rightly praise the quality of Irish beef, lamb and dairy products, but it may be that we are missing the zone where we produce a peerless, world-beating product on our wee island: apples.
Produce an apple in the right ecosphere, where a slow-growing cold season is followed by longer days and mild weather, and you produce a superlative piece of fruit. Having this ideal climate zone is why the orchard areas of County Antrim and the Irish Midlands are so prized: they offer apple growers the ideal environment to produce fruit that is crisp, flavourful, thirst-quenching, crunchy, and delicious, thanks to the slow doubling of the apple’s cells as it grows.
Everything, in other words, that an apple from Chile or Italy cannot match.
If you produce great apples, you also produce great apple juice. And to taste one of the best, just grab one of the new releases from Attyflin estate, grown at Patrickswell, County Limerick. Attyflin’s signature apple is the Rosette, and from this they produce a lollipop-pink juice which is memorably fine. The 2024 has just been released – the wine of Ireland, for sure – and the juice is distinguished by a textured mouth-feel and that perfect balance between sweet-not-sweet. It slakes a thirst like a pomological assassin and, get this: the wine of Limerick costs €5 per bottle, a steal for such a distinctive drink.
The Attyflin rosette is a showstopper drink, and perfectly captures the estate’s grow-pick-press ethos: this is freshness in a bottle with scents of apple skin and sherbet.
Just as fine are the apple juice, and the apple and elderflower infusion, but the Rosette gets the rosette.
Available in Avoca and good stores, and you can order online.
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Beautiful! I hope to visit Brigit's Garden someday!
Like many of us, I've been guilty for years of overlooking Irish apples in supermarkets. For the past few months I've been enjoying Irish grown apples from Lidl. The name of one variety I don't remember now, but the other is Patrick. They're delicious.