Discover Clifden

The town John D'Arcy built on the edge of Connemara

Clifden, in Irish An Clochán, was founded around 1812 by John D'Arcy, a member of one of the old Tribes of Galway, who set out to build a town on his seventeen-thousand-acre Connemara estate. Within twenty years it had a few hundred houses, schools, churches and a brewery, and it has been the main town of Connemara ever since. The two spires that define the skyline belong to the Catholic St Joseph's and the Protestant Christ Church, with the Twelve Bens, in Irish Na Beanna Beola, rising behind.

Connemara is part of the largest Gaeltacht in Ireland, and Irish is still spoken across the wider region. Clifden itself is the base for almost everything people come west for: the Sky Road loop, the ruined D'Arcy castle, the tidal crossing to Omey Island, the Derrygimlagh bog where Marconi built his transatlantic wireless station and Alcock and Brown landed in 1919, and the pony and arts festivals that fill the town in late summer. There is no railway here, the line to Galway closed in 1935, so the road in is the N59 across the bog.