Qualla: Aillebrack

Aillebrack: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Aillebrack: Stone, Water, and Lasting Names

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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-r...

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Aillebrack: Middens and Memorial Stones

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Aillebrack: St. Caillín's School

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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