The story locals tell, when asked where the Connemara pony came from, goes like this. Sometime in the centuries when Spanish ships still ran the Atlantic coast of Ireland, one of them broke up on the rocks near Slyne Head. Arabian horses, kept aboard for Iberian buyers, swam ashore. They found the small native ponies grazing the windbeaten grass and bred with them. What came out of that meeting was the Connemara pony - hardy enough for the bog and the cliff, but with desert blood somewhere in the line. The legend is older than the pedigrees can prove. It is the kind of explanation that gets handed down because it makes a kind of romantic sense, even if the genetic truth is more prosaic.
The nineteenth-century antiquarian John O'Donovan documented at least five spellings of the village's name - Ballyconneely, Baile 'ic Conghaile, Ballykineely, Ballycunneely, Balyconneely - none of them quite settled. An Post's Placenames Branch later recorded yet more variants. The surname Conneely traces back to Mac Conghaile, a sept distinct from the entirely unrelated Ó Conghaola of southern Galway. The village name appears to come from Muintear Chlann Chonghaile, the people of the Conneely clan, or from Clann Mhic Conghaile - the family of the sons of Conghal. The variations are not just orthographic. They are evidence of a place where Irish and English met for centuries, each pulling the name into its own phonetic shape, neither quite winning.
Every July, the Ballyconneely pony show brings the surrounding county into the village. Livestock is exhibited, a travelling funfair sets up, and Connemara ponies - some of them champions from as far away as Britain and the United States - are paraded and judged. Three miles east, Roundstone Bog stretches out: an expanse of moor, lake, and stream that holds wildlife and rare plants of a kind the rest of Ireland has largely lost to drainage and agriculture. Beyond the bog lies Roundstone Bay. The beaches around Ballyconneely yield, at low tide, almost everything a forager could want from the Atlantic shore: clams, cockles, mussels, razor-shells, sea urchins, shrimp, scallops, and occasionally, if you know where to look, a lobster.
In 1975, a team of Dutch botanists arrived at Ballyconneely to study the lakes and water chemistry of the area. They continued their work across Ireland until 2010 - thirty-five years - because Ireland's post-Ice Age landscape preserved something the Netherlands had long since drained and tilled into oblivion. The hard-water lakes, the bogs, the unaltered hydrology: these were a window onto a Europe that elsewhere had vanished. At Bunowen Pier, the Connemara Smokehouse smokes salmon over wood. Two shops, a post office, a community hall, a parish hall, a hotel, a 27-hole golf links, and several guest-houses make up the rest of village life. Former Taoiseach Brian Cowen keeps a holiday home in nearby Dunloughan, close to the golf course - a quiet vote for the place from someone who could have chosen anywhere.
Locals will sometimes mention, with the casual pride of people standing on contested historical ground, that the Marconi wireless station built nearby in 1905 sent the first commercial transatlantic wireless message - to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia in 1907. The detail belongs to the Clifden Marconi station a short distance north, not strictly to Ballyconneely itself, but the achievement belongs to the wider Connemara coast: a coastline that, for one strange decade at the start of the twentieth century, was the place where the new century learned to speak across the ocean.
Located at 53.43 N, 10.07 W, on the west Connemara coast of County Galway. Visual landmarks include Doon Hill (the volcanic plug to the south), Bunowen Pier, and the 27-hole Connemara Golf Links spreading west toward Slyne Head. Nearest airports: Connemara Regional (EICA) at Inverin, about 50 km east; Galway (EICM) further east. Atlantic weather dominates - the same exposure that drew Marconi and the Dutch botanists also brings sudden squalls and frequent low cloud.