Kylemore Abbey: A Tea Lover’s Delight...

A tea taker and history buff’s delight in County Galway, Ireland

Text by Amy Brecount White

Sage tea? That idea may not have crossed your mind, but this simple, savory infusion is a regular and welcome offering at Kylemore Abbey’s garden teahouse in the Connemara region of Galway. Rest assured, the sage leaves have been recently gathered in their 6-acre walled Victorian garden, steeped for the recommended three minutes with hot (not boiling) water, and truly hit the spot after you’ve walked the verdant grounds or toured some of the tens of rooms in this former castle turned Benedictine abbey. Yes, that means nuns, and their story is as captivating as their culinary offerings.

From their locally inspired teahouse menu, you might also choose spearmint tea for a lift or lemon balm tea for healing. Of course, they offer Bewley’s Irish breakfast tea from that must-visit institution in Dublin and other black tea choices. With mainly windows for walls, the teahouse is a lovely spot from which to absorb the historical ambiance of this once-40,000-acre grand estate. Gazing toward the mountains of the Connemara National Park, you’ll likely see the adorable Connemara ponies and mares, a native Irish breed, enjoying the fields with their foals.

To accompany your tea, you can choose from locally harvested fare—including Cleggan Bay prawns and Connemara smoked salmon. In the mood for soup? You might find it hard to decide between their potato with hand-picked Kylemore dill and the tomato, carrot, and basil cream. Don’t miss the seeded brown Irish soda bread or both sweet and savory scones with vegan lemon curd. A surprising number of their dishes are gluten-free and vegan. While some might view nuns and abbeys as relics of the past, Kylemore’s food offerings are very much in the moment.

“We get so many different visitors from all around the world with different dietary needs that we get used to being asked for everything,” says Chef John O’Toole. Their vegan chocolate cake is moist and flavorful and decorated with flowers from the garden.

Before or after your tea, you’ll want to roll back time and study the fascinating castle and the grounds designed for hunting, fishing, and shooting. Kylemore means “the big or great woods” in Gaelic, and the original owners, Margaret and Mitchell Henry, helped restore those great woods as they built their castle in the late 1860s. The walled garden alone once boasted 21 heated glasshouses and a workforce of 40 gardeners to farm delicacies from around the world for the Henrys’ household and London tables. Back in the day, the glasshouses were heated with more than 5,000 feet of cast-iron pipes. The estate is now being restored to its original Victorian plantings and some of that grandeur.

While Henry was an Englishman, “all [his] blood was Irish,” he said, and he advocated for Irish rights and causes during his days as a member of the British House of Commons. The happy couple had nine children, but Margaret succumbed to dysentery while touring Egypt and passed away just a few years after the castle was built. Take the engrossing Kylemore house tour if you want to find out more about their family, see their daughter Jersey’s gorgeous wedding dress, and learn about Mitchell’s efforts to protect the rights of the impoverished of West Region of Ireland. You’ll see the ladies’ room—complete with a faux tea set—which shows how, at the time, such ladies were expected to be diminutive. Their furniture was stunningly short.

Eventually, Mitchell sold Kylemore to the gambling Duke of Manchester, who had married a Cincinnati heiress to bail him out, but even they couldn’t keep up with the expansive property’s maintenance costs. The estate was on the market for seven years.

Meanwhile, in Ypres, Belgium, a group of Benedictine nuns realized they had to relocate. After their Belgian abbey was bombed in 1914 during World War I, the nuns fled and headed toward Ireland. Arriving in Kylemore via England, the nuns—whose tradition follows ora et labora (pray and work)—took out a £32,000 mortgage to purchase the property in 1920 and got down to business to open a girls’ school and get the abbey farm and grounds running again. Inside the castle, you can follow their story through audiovisual displays, along with furniture, photos, and keepsakes from the days when the school thrived. Both boarders and local girls studied here, and the school counted three Indian (from India) princesses in their numbers. The school thrived for 90 years but closed in 2010, due to falling enrollment and rising costs.

The 14 current Kylemore nuns—who come from Belgium to Australia to China—are savvy businesswomen. When they realized their school was no longer sustainable, they turned to entrepreneurial means of earning reliable income in a way that reflects their traditions of hospitality and craft. Chocolate-making popped into Sister Genevieve Harrington’s mind. She took a weekend course from a French chocolatier, and their chocolate factory now can barely keep up with demand. You can sample some in the teahouse or stop by the expansive on-site gift shop to purchase their mouthwatering delicacies, including raspberry, blood orange, and ginger and honey flavors. They also offer locally inspired soap, pottery, and an abundance of Irish-themed items. Their honey comes from the estate’s million native bees in hives and is one of the many ways the nuns now focus on sustainability and preserving the health of this rich land.

The Kylemore garden teahouse is open from Easter to Halloween yearly, from 11:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Grounds admission is required. For more information, go to kylemoreabbey.com or call +353 95 52001.

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Amy Brecount White seeks vibrant tea experiences across the world and loves to connect with new tea people.