Qualla: Cliffs of Moher

Cliffs of Moher: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris06, CC BY-SA 4.0. The cliffs lift out of the Atlantic in stacks of Namurian sandstone, layer upon dark layer, the oldest at the bottom. They run for fourteen kilometers along the southwestern edge of the Burren. At Hag's Head they stand 120 meters above the surf. Eight kilometers north, just past O'Brien's Tower - a small round folly built in 1835 by Sir Cornelius O'Brien to entertain his guests - they peak at 214 meters. That is the height of a sixty-story building, dropped straight into salt water. From the rim you can see the Aran Islands floating in Galway Bay and, on a clear afternoon, the Twelve Pins rising out of Connemara to the north.

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Image: Chris06 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cliffs of Moher: What the Delta Left Behind

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The sandstone you see in cross-section here was laid down between 313 and 326 million years ago, in the Carboniferous. The cliffs preserve a record of a river delta dumping sand, silt, and clay into a deep marine basin - some of the finest deltaic geology exposed anywhere in the ...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cliffs of Moher: Puffins, Basking Sharks, and Bilberry Goats

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jerzy Strzelecki, CC BY-SA 3.0. Atlantic puffins nest here in the thousands, with their orange-striped beaks and clumsy stutter-step takeoffs, raising chicks in burrows on the small Goat Island and on isolated cliff terraces unreachable by anything but wings. Choughs - the cliff-dwelling crows with red beaks an...

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Image: Jerzy Strzelecki | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cliffs of Moher: Aill na Searrach

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Liscannorman, CC BY-SA 3.0. Just off the cliffs, where a reef rises just enough to disrupt the swell driving in from three thousand miles of open Atlantic, a wave breaks that surfers spent decades trying to reach. They named it Aileens - more properly Aill na Searrach, the cliff of the foals - and on the ra...

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Image: Liscannorman | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cliffs of Moher: Built Into the Hill

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris06, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the 1990s Clare County Council faced a problem most tourism authorities would envy: too many visitors. Almost a million people a year were arriving at a site with no real infrastructure, walking right to the unprotected cliff edge to take photographs. The Council planned a vis...

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Image: Chris06 | CC BY-SA 4.0