Qualla: Boho Caves

Boho Caves: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fattonyni, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1947, a parish priest named James McGirr was buried in soil that locals had been using as a folk cure for generations. They believed the earth at Boho had healing powers. They were not entirely wrong. Some seventy years later, a scientist named Gerry Quinn would scoop up a sample of that same soil and discover, hiding in it, a strain of Streptomyces bacteria capable of stopping MRSA. The Boho Caves themselves had been carving their way through Carboniferous limestone for 325 million years before anyone thought to look there for medicine, but the ground above them seems to know something we are only beginning to understand.

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Image: Fattonyni | CC BY-SA 3.0

Boho Caves: Stones from a Tropical Sea

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fattonyni, CC BY-SA 3.0. The rock that the Boho Caves snake through formed when Ireland sat near the equator. During the Asbian substage of the Carboniferous period, around 325 million years ago, a warm shallow sea deposited the calcium carbonate that became the Dartry Limestone Formation. Above it lies ...

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Image: Fattonyni | CC BY-SA 3.0

Boho Caves: The River That Vanishes

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Murray, CC BY-SA 2.0. The water that flows through the Boho system rises in the Aghanaglack River, but the river does not always travel by the route you might expect. In dry weather, the streambed disappears entirely, the water sinking through invisible joints in the rock far upstream and reemerging f...

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Image: Andy Murray | CC BY-SA 2.0

Boho Caves: Two Centuries of Visitors

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fattonyni, CC BY-SA 3.0. People have known about these caves for hundreds of years. They appear on the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland made between 1829 and 1841, and by 1870 the guidebook writer William Wakeman noted that tourists routinely arranged guided tours with local residents. In 1895, É...

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Image: Fattonyni | CC BY-SA 3.0

Boho Caves: The Bats of the Upper Ravine

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fattonyni, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around fifty Daubenton's bats roost in the Upper Ravine Cave, a population that has been recognized as biologically significant since at least the late nineteenth century, when bats were observed here in July 1895. Daubenton's bats, also called water bats, are small brown mammals...

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Image: Fattonyni | CC BY-SA 3.0

Boho Caves: The Antibiotic in the Ground

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fattonyni, CC BY-SA 3.0. The soil above the Boho Caves is alkaline and slightly radioactive, the kind of chemistry that produces unusual microbial life. In 2018, Professor Paul Dyson and his colleagues isolated a previously unknown strain of Streptomyces bacteria from a sample of that soil, naming it Str...

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Image: Fattonyni | CC BY-SA 3.0

Boho Caves: Walking In

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fattonyni, CC BY-SA 3.0. The sixth longest cave system in Northern Ireland sits beneath the northern slopes of Belmore Mountain, near the small village of Boho. The Boho Caves include the main passage, the smaller Waterfall Cave, and the Upper and Lower Ravine Caves, all interconnected by the same underg...

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Image: Fattonyni | CC BY-SA 3.0