The day before we left Galway, I got my hair cut. That’s always a potentially traumatic experience on the road, but I found someone I liked. She gave me her mobile number so I could text her at home on a Sunday to make an appointment, for crying out loud, what’s not to like? So while we were chatting as she snipped away, she asked me where we were off to next.

“Westport,” I answered.

“Oh, Westport!” she gushed. “That’s where we go when we want to get away from Galway.” Get away from Galway? Why? We love this city. “Be sure to stop at Killary Harbour on your way. The fjord is beautiful.” Fjord? In Ireland???

Yes, Ireland does have fjords, it turns out. Three of them. And one is Killary Harbour. I thought fjord was a Scandinavian word for a long, narrow inlet or bay. According to my research assistant, however, a fjord is not just a foreign word but also a geological phenomenon. During an ice age, as the rapid accumulation of snow and ice compacts and forms a glacier in a river valley, the weight of the glacier eventually causes it to slide down the valley toward the sea. The V-shaped river valley is carved wider and rounder, into more of a U-shape, by the glacier. At the end of the ice age, the warming climate causes the glacier to melt and the ice effectively recedes back up the valley as the glacier gets smaller. 

When the glacier starts to recede, moraine—that rocky rubble that the glacier has been chiseling off the valley floor and walls and pushing down the valley—is deposited at the lower end and forms a sill or lip to the basin that it’s carved out. Seas rise as glaciers melt, and eventually they rise higher than the sill and flood the basin, creating a fjord. Non-fjordal inlets are the more V-shaped, river-cut valleys that weren’t rounded out by glaciers and don’t have sills that a glacier would leave behind. And there endeth the lesson, as Sean Connery would say.

We didn’t have time for a boat trip into the fjord, but we did stop at a lay-by to watch the boats go by and absorb the beauty.

Get a load of those rhododendrons! I stood mesmerized in a sea of deep pink. My guess is we passed through at peak bloom. Now that, my friends, is beautiful countryside and another serendipitous moment, all because I needed a haircut.