Qualla: Cill Ghallagáin

Cill Ghallagáin: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the mid-1970s, a researcher named Seamas O Cathain sat down with an elderly fisherman in a small townland on the Atlantic coast of County Mayo and asked him to list the local place-names. The fisherman was Sean O hEiniri, a monolingual Irish speaker who had spent his whole life on this patch of bog and cliff. He named eight hundred. Eight hundred names for fields, rocks, caves, coves, bog holes, hollows, springs, slopes, and stones, all within an area of 852 acres. Each name carried a story or a memory or both. When the book was finally published, it became one of the most extraordinary documents of Irish microtoponymy ever assembled, a private map of a private world that almost slipped away with the man who knew it.

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Image: Gordon Hatton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cill Ghallagáin: The Cairn by the Bay

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Munifico, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the graveyard at Cill Ghallagain, near the beach at Broadhaven Bay, stands a large mound that has never been excavated. Local tradition holds that it covers the remains of an early Christian church founded by St Galligan, the saint who gave the townland its name. Galligan is s...

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Image: Munifico | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cill Ghallagáin: The Pirate Queen's Husband

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Laurel Lodged, CC0. In 1580, the second husband of Grainne O'Malley - the pirate queen of Connacht - is believed to have owned the promontory fort called Doonaniron, just along this stretch of coast. Richard Burke held large tracts of land along the north-western edge of Erris, and his marriage to O...

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Image: Laurel Lodged | CC0

Cill Ghallagáin: Sean O hEiniri

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArséniureDeGallium, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sean O hEiniri died in 1998, the last in his generation of monolingual Irish speakers in this part of Mayo - a man who lived his entire life through one language, in one townland, in one set of place-names handed down by his neighbours and his parents. He was a seanchai, a tradit...

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Image: ArséniureDeGallium | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cill Ghallagáin: The Famine and the Sheep

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CeltBrowne, CC BY-SA 4.0. During the Great Famine the area was devastated. People died in numbers Erris would never replace. In November 1850, with the worst still recent, the postmaster of Bangor Erris - a man named Robert Savage - wrote to Dublin Castle reporting that eighteen of his sheep at Cill Ghall...

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Image: CeltBrowne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cill Ghallagáin: Kid Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Off the northern coast lies Kid Island, thirty-two acres of cliff rising 311 feet above the Atlantic. In summer the islanders' descendants still graze sheep there, ferried across when the weather allows. The cliffs themselves carry striped pink and orange gneiss - rocks of stagge...

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Image: Gordon Hatton | CC BY-SA 2.0