Qualla: Dooagh

Dooagh: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Boholaman at English Wikipedia, Public domain. In April 2017, the residents of Dooagh woke up to discover something they had not seen since before many of them were born. Their beach had come back. For 33 years, since a vicious 1984 storm scoured the sand from the cove and left only a rocky foreshore, Dooagh had been a village with no beach to speak of. Then, over the course of a few days in April 2017, an unusually high spring tide deposited 300 metres of golden sand back onto the same patch of shoreline. Tourists arrived. National newspapers ran the story. The local pubs filled up. The beach lasted not quite two years. By early 2019, the sand had washed away again, and Dooagh was back to rock. The Atlantic gives, and the Atlantic takes, and on the western edge of Achill Island the only certainty is that the shoreline will keep changing.

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Image: Boholaman at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Dooagh: The Beach That Came Back

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0. What happened in 2017 was not magic - it was geomorphology. Beaches are reservoirs of sand that move constantly along the coast under the influence of waves, tides, and storms. A single severe storm can strip a beach in days, as happened in 1984. The right combination of unusuall...

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Image: A.-K. D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dooagh: Don Allum's Atlantic

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.-K. D., CC0. In the centre of Dooagh village stands a small monument to a man named Don Allum. In 1987, Allum rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean from west to east - completing a feat he had first attempted decades earlier, when he and a companion rowed the western crossing in 1971. He lande...

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Image: A.-K. D. | CC0

Dooagh: Boycott's House on the Hill

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kiran Madhusudhanan, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the road from Dooagh up toward Lough Acorrymore stands Corrymore House. In the 1880s it was the home of a man whose name has since entered the English language. Captain Charles Boycott was a land agent for absentee landlords in this part of Mayo, and in 1880 the local tenants ...

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Image: Kiran Madhusudhanan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dooagh: Scoil Acla and the Music

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cmeide, CC BY-SA 3.0. Since 1910, the Irish traditional music summer school Scoil Acla has met every August in Dooagh. The painter Paul Henry - one of the most influential Irish artists of the early twentieth century, whose paintings of the Achill landscape helped fix the western seaboard in the natio...

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Image: Cmeide | CC BY-SA 3.0