Articles > Achill Island

The Atlantic coast of Ireland, 300 miles in a direct line from Malin Head to Mizen Head, is an unbroken succession of jagged headlands, fiord-like inlets and craggy islands. Since the retreat of the ice-age glaciers, these bulwarks have stood against the constant battering of ocean winds and waves, to produce a series of unique variations on the theme of the wild spectacular.

The largest of the islands, standing only just apart from the West Mayo coast, is Achill. An inverted L-shape, measuring 12 miles on one arm by 14 along the other, it is joined to the mainland by a bridge across the narrow Achill Sound. Though its insularity is almost incidental, it has allowed the island to retain a character which seems to belong to an earlier century. Its centres of population consist of small scatterings of white-painted houses along the shoreline at the edges of bogs flanked to north and south by steep mountains. Travellers have always been attracted to its beauties, as have artists and writers, including one Nobel Prize winner. Yet it has not succumbed to the vulgar side of tourism, and its beaches - among the cleanest in Europe - are never crowded.

A short distance onto the island a left turn off the main road leads to the Atlantic Drive, which traces its way around the southern peninsula. This begins calmly enough along the shore of Achill Sound, past small hamlets and the waterside cemetery of Kildownet. The sadness of Irish history is here apparent in the numerous rough stones marking the graves of unnamed victims of the famine. Achill is in many ways a microcosm of Ireland. In 1840 its population stood at 6000. As a result of the famine and the many waves of emigration that followed, this figure has halved and continues to decline.

Among the shoreline rocks and bladder wrack, just outside the cemetery walls, one of Ireland’s numerous holy wells bubbles up from a subterranean source. Though only yards from the sea it is completely salt-free, if somewhat cloudy in appearance. A short distance away a tower house stands guard over the southern end of the sound. Said to have been built by the powerful pirate queen of Elizabethan times, Grace O’ Malley, it was in fact constructed more than a century before her time.

On turning the southern tip of the island one moves abruptly into a landscape of complete contrast. The vegetation of Achill is nowhere very tall. Trees are few, and bent viciously by the wind and are found only in the lee of the hills. Nevertheless, on the eastern side of the island plant life thrives in the warm Gulf Stream climate and is profligate in form and colour. On the west, however, the gales have flattened everything to the level of sparse grass and heather.

The road leads along the rims of cliffs, past knife-edge ridges jutting into the sea from which rock stacks protrude like petrified monsters. Down a series of sharp hairpins, then up again over more cliffs until one feels quite glutted with scenery. It is almost a relief to turn inland once more at the small fishing village of Dooega.

A good deal of Achill’s magnificence is due to its mountains, two of which rise steeply to heights of greater than two thousand feet. The most westerly mountain, Croghan, juts arrogantly into the Atlantic. In spite of the harshness of the climate, the occasional orchid can be found standing proud of the heather, while a fox may be seen springing up the crags. Less than five yards from the summit fall the sea cliffs that are claimed to be the highest in Europe.

The slightly higher Slievemore to the east is, like Croghan, a stiff climb without the mitigation of a track to the summit, and is strictly for the keen hillwalker. Minaun, on the other hand, can be driven up in a car. Its summit gives what are perhaps the best and most extensive views on the island, ranging over Keel Bay and the coast of Mayo, then south to Clare Island, Clew Bay and Ireland’s Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick.

History mingles with pre-history around the lower slopes of the mountains, in the megalithic tombs and ruins of booley villages that bound here. Booleying, or transhumance, was the custom whereby the people moved with their livestock to high pastures in summer and returned in winter to the lowlands. The practice continued on Achill until the mid-nineteenth century, longer than anywhere else in Ireland, but slowly died out with the rise of the landowning class.

One of the more notorious landowners, Captain Charles Boycott, whose name became part of the English language, built Corrymore House, which stands on Croghan mountain. A much more welcome visitor, Nobel Prize-winning author Heinrich Böll, once described Achill beautifully in his ‘Irish Journal,’ and later bought a house at Dugort, below Slievemore.

Literature is one of many arts encouraged in Achill. The Scoil Acla movement revived in 1985 from a similar one in the early part of the century holds annual workshops on writing, painting, music and dancing at a variety of venues during August. The Yawl Art Gallery in Dooega extends its activities through weekend courses from March to September.

On the more physical side Achill provides excellent scope for climbing, hang-gliding, surfing and diving. The area is also well known for sea angling, and holds records for the largest sharks caught in Irish waters. The head of the biggest porbeagle shark adorns the wall behind the bar of the Achill Head Hotel in Keel.

Holidays on Achill are generally of the quieter type, giving space and time for complete withdrawal or for indulging in some chosen physical or artistic endeavour. Those who wish for noise and continuous entertainment will find none of it here. What night life there is revolves round civilized musical sessions in the bars and hotels, sometimes followed (usually after midnight) by a disco for young people.

There is said to be only a single policeman on the island, and he is not overworked. Banks are even scarcer being represented by an ATM and a van, which visits from the mainland for a few hours, twice a week. There are no plans for further development. The residents like it that way. And so do the visitors.

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