Through Connemara in a governess cart

In the 1890s, two cousins undertake an improbable journey across Connemara in a governess cart, a light, two-wheeled conveyance barely large enough for their luggage, let alone two full-grown adults and their irrepressible optimism. What follows is a portrait of western Ireland at a moment of transition: the old ways still breathing, the modern world creeping in by fits and starts. Martin Ross writes with the sharp, affectionate eye of someone who loves her subjects too much to flatter them. The locals they encounter range from generous to maddening, the weather alternates between magnificent and murderous, and the roads, if they can be called roads, test every assumption the cousins have brought from more civilized climes. This is travel writing that understands humor is not the enemy of beauty; it is how we survive it. Through Connemara in a Governess Cart captures a world that would vanish within decades, rendered with a wit that feels almost contemporary.