The opening of Broadhaven Bay faces straight north, 8.6 km of water between Erris Head in the west and Kid Island in the east. Behind it sit the parishes of Kilcommon, Kiltane, and Kilmore Erris, three pieces of the ancient Barony of Erris. The land that wraps around the bay is mostly Atlantic blanket bog, broken here and there by machair, the rare wind-shaped grassland that grows only where sand, sheep, and salt agree to coexist. Sand beaches lie along the eastern and southern shores at Carrowteige, Glengad, and Inver. The population scattered around these inlets is small. The bay does most of the work.

In 1588, ships of the Spanish Armada, scattered by storms after their failed attempt on England, were driven onto the west coast of Ireland. Several foundered in the waters of North Mayo. One of them, the Santiago, went down in Broadhaven Bay. The wreck became one entry in a long ledger of vessels lost on this coast. The Wikipedia record notes 'many tales of fortunes of gold and valuables being stashed away by local pirates after looting unfortunate ships,' a memory preserved in stories like that of Brian Rua U'Cearbhain, the Erris prophet whose vivid visions of the future supposedly drew on the spoils of foundered ships. Whatever lay buried, the bay has kept most of it. Broadhaven still claims wrecks; the Ballyglass lifeboat at the eastern pier exists because the work of saving lives here is not finished.

Look northeast from the bay toward Benwee Head and you will see them: five jagged rocky islands rising out of the Atlantic like the fingertips of something half-drowned. Na Stácaí, the Stags of Broadhaven. The highest, called Teach Dónal Ó'Cléirigh, sits in the centre of the group. An t-Oighean stands 78 metres above sea level. They lie just over a mile from the mainland and yet officially fall outside County Mayo's coastal boundary. Puffins nest here. So do storm petrels and Leach's petrels, both small ocean birds that spend most of their lives at sea and come ashore only to breed. One of the Stags is bisected by a long narrow cave that opens at both ends, a feature divers and kayakers travel to see. Sheep once grazed here for six weeks every summer until the 1960s, when the grazing stopped.

Between 2002 and 2014, Broadhaven Bay was the front line of one of Ireland's longest environmental disputes. Royal Dutch Shell, working to bring gas ashore from the Corrib field offshore, sent the Solitaire, then reputed to be the largest pipelaying ship in the world, into the bay. Local opposition was sustained and bitter. The planning appeals board, An Bord Pleanála, overturned Shell's proposals more than once. A third application proposed boring a 4.2-metre tunnel under the entire length of the bay to carry a 0.5-metre pipeline, with the developers acknowledging that the oversized tunnel was sized to carry all future finds along the same route. The fisherman Pat O'Donnell served five months in Castlerea prison in early 2010 for refusing to stop fishing the bay while the work continued. The protected anemones, the brent geese, the otters, the visiting whales, the seventy-two marine species: all of it sat above what was being built below.