Qualla: Cape Clear Island

Cape Clear Island: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kondephy, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the first weekend of September each year, storytellers gather on a windswept island eight kilometres off the coast of County Cork to do what islanders here have done for centuries - sit close together and talk. The Cape Clear Island International Storytelling Festival has run every year since 1994, drawing tellers from across Ireland and beyond to a place where Irish is still the everyday language of a third of the residents. Cape Clear is small enough to walk across in an afternoon and remote enough that until 1995 it ran on diesel generators. It is also, by a few hundred metres of geography, the southernmost inhabited part of Ireland.

Read more: Cape Clear Island on Qualla

Image: Kondephy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cape Clear Island: An Island Cut in Half

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pl:Wikipedysta:A., CC BY 2.5. The Irish call it Cleire, or Oilean Chleire. In English it is Clear Island or, more commonly, Cape Clear. A narrow waist of land called - inevitably - the Waist divides the island into east and west halves, with North Harbour on the landward side and South Harbour facing open Atl...

Read more: Cape Clear Island on Qualla

Image: pl:Wikipedysta:A. | CC BY 2.5

Cape Clear Island: Layers in the Stone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pl:Wikipedysta:A., CC BY 2.5. People have been on Cape Clear a very long time. The archaeological record on the island includes a prehistoric cup-marked stone, now kept in the small island museum; a fulacht fiadh at Gort na Lobhar (Bronze Age cooking sites, ash-pits where stones were heated and dropped into w...

Read more: Cape Clear Island on Qualla

Image: pl:Wikipedysta:A. | CC BY 2.5

Cape Clear Island: A Place Where Irish Is Spoken

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Craig, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cape Clear is one of the Gaeltacht areas, the regions where the Irish state recognises Irish as the daily community language. The 2016 census found 62 percent of islanders over the age of three claiming the ability to speak Irish, and 27 percent saying they actually used it daily...

Read more: Cape Clear Island on Qualla

Image: Tony Craig | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cape Clear Island: Birds, Sharks, Storytellers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Superbass, CC BY-SA 4.0. If you arrive in autumn carrying binoculars, you have probably come for the birds. Cape Clear's mild oceanic climate and exposed position make it one of Europe's premier migration watch-points; the lighthouse and bird observatory together turn the island into a station where rare...

Read more: Cape Clear Island on Qualla

Image: Superbass | CC BY-SA 4.0