Qualla: Ballinskelligs

Ballinskelligs: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jibi44, CC BY 2.5. Baile an Sceilg means "town of the craggy rock," and the rocks in question are not visible from the village itself. To see them you walk down to the beach, look west, and wait for the haze to clear. There, eight miles offshore, sit Skellig Michael and Little Skellig - the craggy rocks that named this place and, for more than a thousand years, defined its imagination. Ballinskelligs is the mainland that watches them. It is also, against the odds, still a working Irish-speaking community, one of the last in Kerry where you can hear the language outside a classroom on a weekday afternoon.

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Image: Jibi44 | CC BY 2.5

Ballinskelligs: A Gaeltacht That Held On

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phil Eptlett, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Gaeltacht is what the Republic calls the regions where Irish is still spoken as a community language, and these regions have been shrinking for two centuries. Ballinskelligs is one of the holdouts. According to the 2016 census, about ten percent of the electoral division spea...

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Image: Phil Eptlett | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballinskelligs: A Castle Built for Pirates

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. On a narrow promontory at the western edge of the bay, the MacCarthy Mor dynasty raised a tower house in the sixteenth century. The official explanation was defense - the Atlantic coast was thick with pirates in those years, French, English, and Algerian. The unofficial explanati...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballinskelligs: The Cable From Nova Scotia

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dafydd Humphreys, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1875, a heavy submarine cable came ashore at Ballinskelligs after traveling 2,565 nautical miles across the open Atlantic from Tor Bay, Nova Scotia. It was one of the earliest transatlantic telegraph cables, and its landing in this small bay made Ballinskelligs, for a moment, ...

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Image: Dafydd Humphreys | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ballinskelligs: Cill Rialaig and the Cliff

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aidannnuigalway, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1990s, a local resident named Noelle Campbell-Sharp acquired the abandoned village of Cill Rialaig, a row of pre-Famine stone cottages perched on a cliff above the Atlantic. Most such villages on this coast have crumbled past restoration. Cill Rialaig was saved and turned ...

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Image: Aidannnuigalway | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ballinskelligs: The Beach and the View

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Creek, CC BY-SA 2.0. Ballinskelligs Strand is a long stretch of pale sand at the head of the bay. On a clear day the water is bright green over the shallows and dark blue further out, and the Skelligs sit on the horizon like notched chess pieces. Surfers and swimmers come in summer. The rest of the y...

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Image: Martin Creek | CC BY-SA 2.0