The Well of the Seven Daughters sits near the foot of Doon Hill, drawing water from rock that has held it for longer than anyone in Aillebrack can remember. Whoever the seven daughters were, their names have slipped past the edge of memory - the well kept them only as an attribution, a way for the local people to call this place sacred. Above the well rises the volcanic plug of Doon Hill itself. Below it, in just 2.6 square kilometres of townland, lives a community of 122 people, a lake of unusually hard water, and the relics of habitation that runs back to the middens of the earliest settlers.
Aillebrack lies in the civil parish of Ballindoon, within the historical barony of Ballynahinch, on the long western fingers of the Errismore peninsula. Lough Aillebrack - a hard-water lake within the Slyne Head Peninsula Special Area of Conservation - holds the kind of mineral-rich water that botanists travel long distances to see. The townland is small, just 2.6 square kilometres, and the nearest town of any size is Clifden, ten kilometres to the northeast. There is no through-traffic. The Local Link bus runs on Thursdays. To live here is to live on a margin where the names matter more than the population, because the names are what binds the present moment to the centuries of people who came before.
Archaeologists working on the townland have catalogued midden sites - the kitchen-debris heaps of ancient settlement - and holy wells whose origins reach beyond written record. The Well of the Seven Daughters near Doon Hill is the most evocative of them. Then there is a stone of a different kind: a memorial on the Aillebrack shore that commemorates the crew of a U.S. Navy Liberator aircraft that crashed off the nearby coast in 1944. The B-24 Liberator was a long-range maritime patrol aircraft, flown across the Atlantic from American bases to hunt U-boats. Some made it home. This one did not. The plaque, set into stone, holds their names where the Atlantic took them.
The primary school nearby - Aillebrack National School, also called St. Caillín's National School after the seventh-century saint whose name still threads through Connemara place-lore - sits closer to Ballyconneely village. The current school building dates from after 1940, when the original burned in a fire. Children in this corner of Connemara still learn under that name, in a building that replaced one the fire took. School fires were not unusual in mid-century rural Ireland, where heating was rudimentary and structures often timber-framed. But the loss of a school, in a townland of only a hundred and twenty-two people, is the loss of the whole village's hearth.
Located at 53.42 N, 10.12 W, on the Atlantic coast of Connemara, County Galway. Doon Hill (67 metres) is the most visible landmark from the air, with Lough Aillebrack and the Slyne Head Peninsula just beyond. Nearest airport: Galway (EICM) to the east, about 80 km. Connemara Regional Airport (EICA) at Inverin is closer. Expect Atlantic weather - low cloud and strong westerlies are common; clear days reveal the long, indented Errismore coastline in remarkable detail.