Brian Rua U'Cearbhain was a real seventeenth-century figure who lived in Erris and made a series of prophecies that have shaped local folklore ever since. He predicted that carriages would run on iron wheels through the bog without horses, which turned out to be the railway. He predicted ships made of iron, which turned out to be the steam packets. Some of his predictions are still considered outstanding. He also predicted, quite specifically, that the bridge at Bellacorick would never be finished. The bridge has four elliptical arches each thirty feet apart, with battlements running nearly four hundred feet long. The construction in the 1820s was technically difficult because of the unusual softness of the peat under the riverbed. One section of the masonry on one corner was never completed. Modern engineers have looked at finishing it. Local tradition has discouraged them. The prophecy is part of why the bridge remains famous, and part of why nobody quite wants to be the one to falsify it.

Peat has been Ireland's domestic fuel for thousands of years and still produces about twelve percent of the country's energy. In June 1949, the local TD James Kilroy stood up in the Dáil and asked the government to build a turf-fired power station in Erris. The argument was practical: there was vast bogland here, the population was poor and remote, and a power station would mean jobs and electricity simultaneously. The government agreed. ESB acquired five and a half acres two hundred metres from the Musical Bridge. Bord na Móna bought 20,000 acres of bogland nearby. They dried the peat in summer, stored it in vast polythene-covered piles, and hauled it to the station by railway wagons pulled by diesel locomotives. The station was built in the early 1960s. Its tall concrete chimney became the dominant feature of the skyline for anyone driving through Erris.

In 2007 the chimney at Bellacorick was demolished. Officially it was a safety decision. The station had ceased generating, the structure was deteriorating, and there was no economic case for restoration. The demolition was less popular than the engineering arguments would suggest. Even local people who had been deeply opposed to the fossil-fuel station on environmental and climate grounds were sad to see it go. For decades, the chimney had been the first landmark visible to anyone driving home to Erris from Castlebar or Ballina. It had marked the moment when you knew you were nearly there. There is a particular emotional pull to that kind of utilitarian landmark, the way industrial chimneys, telecommunications masts, and oil refineries become accidental waypoints for the people who live nearby. The chimney came down. The bog stayed.

In 1992, Ireland's first commercial wind farm began turning on the same exposed plain where the chimney still stood. Bellacorick had been identified for years as perhaps the best wind site in the country: a mean annual wind speed of 7.28 metres per second at thirty metres up, prevailing south-westerly winds that blow more than half the year, flat ground with no topographical features to cause turbulence, and an existing connection to the national grid through the nearby thermal power station. The original wind farm had 21 turbines totalling 6.45 megawatts, enough for 4,500 households. Compared to a modern offshore farm those are modest numbers, but Bellacorick was first. The same wind that had blown through the open Musical Bridge for two centuries was now generating clean electricity, while the chimney that had burned the bog itself was being torn down. The same patch of Mayo bog has now hosted both ends of Ireland's energy transition.

Bellacorick has been quiet for most of its history, but it had a brief and violent moment in 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. The local Royal Irish Constabulary police station was captured and burned by a group of IRA volunteers from Crossmolina, eight kilometres east. It was one of dozens of similar attacks happening across Ireland that year, as the campaign to drive British police out of rural Ireland intensified. The RIC station was never rebuilt. Bellacorick today is a townland of 278 hectares with no village proper, just the bridge, the wind farm, the empty footprint of the demolished power station, and Bus Éireann route 446 stopping once a day on its way between Crossmolina, Ballina, and Belmullet.