The Village
The Mac Proinnséas shop is a combined newsagent's, grocery store, post office, and petrol station opposite Cill Éinne (St. Enda's Church) in the centre of the village. There is also a pharmacy, a bank, and Feeney's butcher shop. Restaurants include a Supermac's fast food outlet and a Chinese restaurant called The Oriental Kitchen. On most weekend nights and sometimes during the week in summer, there is live traditional Irish music in the pubs, most of which double as restaurants. Hughes' pub hosts traditional music sessions where famous musicians sometimes play. An Crúiscín Lán is a hotel, pub, and restaurant. The Boluisce is a pub and seafood restaurant named after a local lake, while other pubs are An Nead and An Tobar. There is a craft centre and gallery called An Cheardlann to the east, and bed and breakfast accommodation can be found around the village.
Once a year, Spiddal welcomes thirty American students spending a semester abroad at the nearby Park Lodge Hotel. The students, from the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in Collegeville Township, Minnesota, spend the autumn months studying Irish literature and culture. The village is served by Bus Éireann route 424 from Galway City.
The local river, known variously as the Owenboliskey, Owenboliska, or Spiddal River (Irish: Abhainn Bhoth Loiscthe), flows south from Boliska Lake and enters Galway Bay at Spiddal.
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Famous quotes containing the word village:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Every day or two I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)