A Tailor-Made Tour in Ireland

Pat Cherrett has recently returned from a bespoke group tour to Ireland. We asked her to share her highlights.

We’re a church group and this is the sixth tour we’ve done with ECT Travel. We enjoy discovering new places together and going on a tour is such an easy way to travel. We say where we’d like to go, and ECT does the rest!

This holiday was a spiritual and cultural journey to Ireland but, because we caught the ferry to Rosslare from Pembroke, we were able to have a few hours in St David’s before we left. And it was an absolute delight – the Cathedral was beyond anything of us imagined.

There were so many highlights once we arrived in Ireland. I loved Clonmacnoise, an early Christian site founded in the mid-6th century by Saint Ciarán on the eastern bank of the River Shannon, that has the largest collection of early Christian grave slabs in Western Europe.

Dublin was fascinating of course – we saw the Book of Kells at Trinity College Library and some of the group were lucky enough to take communion at St Patrick’s Cathedral – and we all absolutely loved our afternoon at Waterford Crystal. We watched one of the craftspeople blowing some glass and discovered that they smash anything that’s not 100% perfect.

There’s no tour manager on these tours. ECT organises everything in advance and I prepare lots of quizzes to keep everyone entertained on the journey, but beyond that, everything really rests on the coach driver. We had the brilliant Phil from Seaview. He looked after us so well and became such a part of the group that he even came to dinner with some us. 

I haven’t been back long but I am already sketching out our next tour in my head - there are still some places we haven’t been to yet.