Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and this is a very,

very special edition, because I'm in one of my favourite places in the whole island of Ireland,

Glen Veigh National Park. And if you haven't been here, well, let me just describe where I am.

This is a U-shaped glacial valley,

I guess straight out of the geography textbooks, but when you see it at close quarters with the

towering cliffs, with the occasional tree dotting the valley floor with a small river flowing

through it into a wide and beautiful lock and you might be

able to hear in the distance a waterfall just cascading down from hundreds of feet into the valley

floor and as a result of that well it was chosen as a fantastic location to build a stately home in the 19th century.

But I don't want to tell you all about that because I have the two experts here.

They are Lee McDade and Claire Bromley of the National Parks Service in Ireland.

Lee, you know all about Glenn Vigh, tell me what the story is.

Yeah, I suppose from a historic point of view, the wealthy landowner called John George Adair

from County Leash. He was passing through this landscape in the 1860s and he said he was

enchanted with the beauty of the area. As I was to say, unlike most visitors,

he was enchanted by the beauty and decided to buy Glenvee. What he did was he bought three estates

which together form what we now know as Glenvee National Park. And that formed over 16,000 hectares.

So a considerable amount of land. John George Adair, a wealthy landowner again,

his main enterprise was in Texas where he owned over a million head of cattle. He used this

summer home. It was very much a hunting estate at the time, but in 1885, John George Adair died

while on business in America and his wife Cornelia Adair took over the running of the estate.

Cornelia Dare again their main home was in County Leash but it mysteriously burned to the ground

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