Qualla: Connemara Heritage and History Centre

Connemara Heritage and History Centre: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Five kilometers east of Clifden on the road into the heart of Connemara, the land rises into bare hills and the modern signposts give way to something stranger. A whitewashed cottage with a thatch roof sits in a stone-walled paddock. Behind it, a reconstructed Iron Age crannóg - a wooden round-house built on a low platform - rises out of a small pool. A ring fort circle, low and grass-grown, marks the boundary of an old enclosure. A clochán, the corbelled stone beehive cell that early Irish monks built for shelter, stands intact and dark inside. This is Dan O'Hara's Homestead - the Connemara Heritage and History Centre - and it is the closest thing in the region to a working museum of how western Ireland lived for two thousand years.

Connemara Heritage and History Centre: Dan O'Hara's Farm

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The center sits in the village of Lettershea, on the working remains of a small farm where the O'Hara family lived before the Great Famine of 1845-49 emptied so much of Connemara. Dan O'Hara himself was a real tenant farmer evicted from this land in the years before the famine - ...

Connemara Heritage and History Centre: Stones and Reconstructions

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Around the homestead the centre - established in the late 1980s - has reconstructed exemplars of older Connemara structures. The crannóg is a faithful rebuild of the kind of timber-and-wattle round-house that Iron Age and early medieval families built on small artificial islands ...

Connemara Heritage and History Centre: The Race Stops Here

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 4 November 2007, eleven teams of racers tore through Dan O'Hara's Homestead on the first leg of CBS's reality competition The Amazing Race 12. The centre served as the first Pit Stop of the season. The racers had flown overnight from Los Angeles to Shannon and driven north int...