Mayo — Land Beneath the Reek

Mayo takes its name from Maigh Eo, ‘the plain of the yew trees’, a vast western county of mountain, bog and Atlantic coastline that has sent more of its people abroad than almost any other.

This is Croagh Patrick, the Reek, where St Patrick is said to have fasted for forty days, still climbed barefoot by pilgrims every summer — and the Céide Fields, a Stone Age farming landscape older than the pyramids, preserved beneath the bog.