Moran's Oyster Cottage: renowned for its superb seafood.

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Glasgow Herald, 29 April 1983

Amid the tang of burning peat

RAYMOND GARDNER waxes poetical as he recalls the fine fare laid before him on a recent trip to Ireland.

'There is no better Oyster than one eats in Moran's Bar.
And people always come back here from foreign lands afar.
Their Oysters are tremendous, and their other shellfish too.
But try some Irish Coffee which can do such good for you.
Then after all these Oysters and the Whiskey you drink here,
You might see mermaids gently swimming in the Weir.'

They call it Moran's at the Weir at Kilcolgan on a backwater of Galway Bay and the white-painted cottage lies there much as it has always lain for 200 years, with the same family behind the bar and in the kitchen and tending the precious oyster beds. We sat beside the Wood-Stanley turf-burning stove from Waterford and the tang of the burning peats hung in the air like Celtic incense.

The poem, with no apologies to McGonagall, was written a few years back by a long standing (sic) customer who happened to be an engraver of tombstones; so he engraved it on a fair bit of Connemara marble and the epitaph sits above the lintel of the door in the kitchen bar.

You can dine there from 11a.m. til the wee sma' hours, if you ever catch the tiny sign which points to Moran's on the road from Galway to Oranmore. We started with oysters at £4.80 Irish the dozen (that's £4.15 Scotch; Jimmy), and they were big oysters, and there was a fair half loaf of brown and branny homemade bread to go with them.

My companion had the seafood special of smoked salmon - so much smoked salmon that she took some away and had it for breakfast the next day - and crab and prawns and crab claws and what, this time, looked like the entire loaf of brown and branny bread. And I had another loaf with around half a pound of juicy crab.

I took the wine of the country and my companion took the wine of another country. We had arrived about noon and and around three hours later somebody asked if they could watch the National and so we all squeezed into another tiny bar where I thought the four folk ensconced knew far too much about racing. It turned out that one of them or all of them bred the beasts and that one of their number hailed from from Glasgow, through she and her friends now lived in Mullingar, from whence they had driven for close on three hours just to sample the pleasure of Moran's.

So we celebrated the meeting both there and at Aintree with more oysters, and when we got outside about 5p.m the sun had not yet set across Galway Bay so I could see quite clearly that there was not a mermaid in sight. But the food was good, and the crack. And the bill for an entire afternoon's entertainment came to £20.13 Irish or around £17 Scotch.

We left the sun to set on Galway Bay to other eyes and bowled off inland to the very heart of Midland Ireland in a car provided by the Irish Tourist Board but which had been made in the land of the rising, rather than the setting sun but which still bore the legend on the rear window - "Save our Jobs - Buy Irish." This may seem logical to the leprechaun or a mermaid even but I didn't get around to asking either.....

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