Qualla: Bere Island

Bere Island: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Towel401, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bere Island's official Irish name is *An tOileán Mór*, the Big Island, which is hopeful: it covers 17.68 square kilometres and held 218 people at the last census. But size is relative, and on Bantry Bay, set against the long Beara Peninsula and the open Atlantic beyond, Bere is large enough to have hosted a Royal Navy fleet, four Martello towers, a barracks for 150 men, and a string of fortifications that the British did not relinquish until 1938. It is large enough today for the French novelist Michel Houellebecq to have made it his hideaway, and large enough to keep two ferries running across to the mainland.

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Image: Towel401 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bere Island: The O'Sullivan Bere and the Siege

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit edited by M.Minderhoud, Public domain. Until 1602, the island belonged to the O'Sullivan Bere, the Gaelic chieftains who controlled this corner of the Beara Peninsula from Dunboy Castle on the mainland. That year, Sir George Carew, the English commander tasked with breaking the Gaelic resistance after the Battle of Ki...

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Image: edited by M.Minderhoud | Public domain

Bere Island: Among Ireland's First Martello Towers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Towel401, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two centuries later, in 1803, with Britain again at war with France and Napoleon's invasion fleet a possibility on the southern Irish coast, Lieutenant-Colonel William Twiss was sent to review Ireland's defences. Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Calder, commanding the Royal Navy squadron ...

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Image: Towel401 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bere Island: The Treaty Port

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Towel401, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1898, the British administration in Dublin Castle issued compulsory purchase orders on large areas of Bere Island to build modern coastal artillery batteries protecting the Royal Navy's Atlantic Squadron at anchor in Berehaven Harbour. The strategic logic was that a fleet hidd...

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Image: Towel401 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bere Island: Stones Older Than Soldiers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trevor Rickard, CC BY-SA 2.0. Beneath the layers of military stone, Bere Island holds older traces. The townland of Greenane contains a circular enclosure, a ringfort, and a standing stone. At Ardaragh West there is a prehistoric hut site and a collapsed wedge tomb. Cloonaghlin West holds another ringfort. Th...

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Image: Trevor Rickard | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bere Island: Two Hundred and Eighteen

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Director of the Ordnance Survey Office, Dublin, Public domain. The 1851 census, taken after the worst of the Great Famine, found 1,454 people on Bere Island. By 2022 the population had fallen to 218. The decline tracks the broader emptying of rural Ireland - emigration, particularly to North America, took generation after generation. Unlike ...

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Image: Director of the Ordnance Survey Office, Dublin | Public domain