About Achill Island
The history, geography, and character of Achill Island.
History & Heritage
An island you drive onto
Achill has had a fixed crossing since 1887, and the current Michael Davitt Bridge, opened in the 20th century and named for the Mayo-born Land League founder, spans the narrow Achill Sound between the villages of Achill Sound and Polranny. That means Achill behaves like a peninsula for anyone arriving by car: no ferry timetable, no crossing to plan around, just a bridge and then 148 square kilometres of island road. Visitors sometimes still expect a boat, and are surprised to find they can drive the whole way from Westport in under an hour.
The Gaeltacht end of the island
The western and southern parts of Achill sit within Gaeltacht Iorrais agus Acaill, an officially recognised Irish-speaking district that also takes in parts of the Erris peninsula on the mainland. Irish is a genuinely living, working language in these townlands, not only a name on a road sign, and the boundary between the Irish-speaking and English-speaking parts of the island has shifted over the twentieth century as older generations passed on. Scoil Acla, the island's long-running summer school of traditional music, dance, sport and Irish-language culture, is one of the clearest expressions of that living tradition, and it draws performers and students back to Achill every summer.
Famine emptied a village and filled the coast
The Deserted Village under Slievemore mountain holds around 80 abandoned single-room stone houses, left behind during the Great Famine of the 1840s as families moved down to the coastal village of Dooagh, where fish and shellfish offered a better chance of survival than the upland farms. For decades afterwards, into the 1940s in some accounts, the older inland settlement was still used seasonally: teenage boys and girls would take cattle up to graze around the empty village for the summer months, a practice known as booleying, before the whole household returned to the coast for winter. The empty houses are still there on the mountain's southern slope, roofless and silent, one of the starkest famine landscapes left standing anywhere in Ireland.
Landlords, basking sharks, and a word that outlived them all
Captain Charles Boycott farmed at Keem Bay from around 1857 before moving to Corrymore House nearby; his later, unrelated dealings as a land agent in Ballinrobe and his 1880 ostracism by the Land League gave the English language the word boycott, even though the actual boycotting happened well off the island. A separate and much more violent episode played out at Valley House on the island's north side in 1894, when land agent James Lynchehaun attacked landlady Agnes McDonnell and set fire to the building; McDonnell survived, Lynchehaun fled to America and fought off extradition, and Valley House itself still stands today as accommodation and a bar. Keem Bay had its own working life too, as a basking shark fishery and later the site of a lifeboat station that operated for more than a hundred years, long before its blue flag and its cliffs made it a filming location for The Banshees of Inisherin.
Mountains that drop straight into the Atlantic
Croaghaun, the island's highest point at 688 metres, carries sea cliffs on its northern face that rank among the highest in Europe, behind only Norway's Hornelen and the Faroe Islands' Cape Enniberg. Closer to the main road, the Cathedral Cliffs of Minaun rise above Keel, and the Atlantic Drive threads a single-track loop past Cloughmore, Ashleam and Dooega on the island's southern shoulder, mountain on one side and open ocean on the other for most of its length. It is a serious, weather-exposed landscape rather than a gentle coastal drive, and the island's Achill Yawls, traditional single-mast wooden sailing boats now enjoying a genuine racing revival each summer, were built for exactly that kind of water.
Wildlife & Nature
Marine Life
Basking sharks
Keem Bay was historically a working basking shark fishery; sightings of these enormous, harmless plankton-feeding sharks still occur off the west end of the island in summer, and boat tours out of Purteen Harbour sometimes encounter them alongside dolphins and seals.
Summer
Grey seals
Grey seals are commonly seen around Achill's coves and inlets, including on boat trips toward Keem Bay and the Minaun cliffs.
Year-round