Qualla: Cleggan

Cleggan: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bert Kaufmann from Roermond, Netherlands, CC BY 2.0. An Cloigeann means head or skull - most likely a reference to the coastal headland that gives the harbor its shape. The other story is older and stranger. St. Ceannanach, a missionary in early Christian Connemara, was beheaded by a pagan chief who then - according to local lore - picked up the saint's head, carried it to the Holy Well at Clooncree, washed it carefully, lay down beside it, and died. The chief presumably had his reasons. The village that grew up around the headland kept the name. Today Cleggan is a small Connemara fishing village, the ferry port for Inishbofin, the western terminus of buses from Galway, and the place where, almost a century ago, the Atlantic broke a community in a single night.

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Image: Bert Kaufmann from Roermond, Netherlands | CC BY 2.0

Cleggan: Nimmo's Pier

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chalky Lives, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Scottish engineer Alexander Nimmo arrived in Connemara in 1822. He had been sent at the request of the Clifden landlord John D'Arcy after the potato crop failed in 1821-22 and famine relief required new infrastructure. Nimmo would spend the next decade designing piers, roads,...

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Image: Chalky Lives | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cleggan: The Night of 28 October 1927

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Markbriggs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Twenty-five men were out in the bay that evening, fishing for mackerel by hand-line from currachs - the small canvas-and-tar boats that had carried Connemara fishermen for centuries. The gale rose without warning and from the worst quarter. They could not run before it. They coul...

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Image: Markbriggs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cleggan: The Bog and the Bones

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit This is a collage of free images in Wikimedia Commons., CC BY-SA 4.0. Outside the village the landscape is dominated by blanket bog - the spongy, water-saturated, acidic vegetation cover that forms across much of the Connemara lowlands wherever rainfall exceeds drainage. Few plants tolerate that soil chemistry, but those that do produce a vegetatio...

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Image: This is a collage of free images in Wikimedia Commons. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cleggan: Village Today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keith Salvesen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cleggan's traditional economy was fishing supplemented by farming on land that fought back. Fishing remains an important industry, joined now by tourism: the village has four bars, a grocer, a sit-down restaurant, a seasonal takeaway, and the ferry that runs twice a day across to...

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Image: Keith Salvesen | CC BY-SA 2.0