Review of Kilgraney House

Posted by: Never Again
17 Apr 2008, 12:57
My girlfriend and I booked the courtyard lodge in April this year for a romantic, rustic Irish getaway. What we got was a stay in rehab!
We arrived by train and soon realised we might be in a spot of bother! there was no facility to call a cab and certainly no rank. I called the hotel to order me one but he told me that it would be about 45 mins so he would come pick me up. 20 mins later he arrived in a battered old alfa that had seen better days and gave us both a half smile half grimace and struggled to bring himself to talk to us on the journey there. We arrived and where greeted by a very tasteful but ultimately desolate scene. Miles from anywhere with no bar to relax in we were shown to our rooms. The Courtyard Lodge I had expected was a nothing more than a glorified one bedroom flat with the odd beam stuck up for effect. This was first time I had been away with my new girlfriend I was beginning to feel like I had made a terrible mistake! Miles from anywhere with no transport, a surly patron, and no atmosphere...things were looking bleak! As an added bonus it also appeared to be a specialist retreat for gay men, which in itself is not a problem for either of us but did make us feel a little excluded as nobody really wanted to talk to us, infact they looked down their noses at us slightly which all added to the comfort factor!!? So with all this in mind we headed out the next day (by Taxi, god bless JJ the Taxi man!) to a horse riding session that I had booked up, yep you guessed it, total disaster! The Carig Beag riding school, which was not far from the Hotel turned out to be a vision of decay on a medieval scale! The pony trekking I had booked to experience the Irish countryside was actually an hours worth of riding around inside a dusty barn with a slightly deranged old woman shouting at you! Nice! Needless to say we gave it a miss, however we were chased off the premises with threats because we would not pay for the booking! Which brings me to my final point about the County Carlow experience...be prepared for a certain amount of hostility towards the English. We encountered it everywhere we went and I would seriously recommend that if you don’t have a very thick skin or you have a short temper, stay well away from the area!