Qualla: Doolough

Doolough: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sometime in the 1950s, on the high sand dunes at Doolough on the north County Mayo coast, the prevailing Atlantic wind exposed something that the people of the townland had long known was there but had hoped not to see. Bones. Small bones, mostly. They were children - infants and small children - who had been buried in the sandbanks during the Famine years of the 1840s and the decades after. There had been no proper cemetery for them at the time, and so they had been placed here, in soft ground above the high tide line, where the wind eventually found them again. The remains were gathered in large boxes and reinterred at Glencastle Cemetery. The dune is now known locally as a cillín - one of the unconsecrated children's burial grounds that scatter the west of Ireland, marking places of unspeakable sorrow that the rest of the country prefers not to remember.

Read more: Doolough on Qualla

Doolough: The Barretts of Doolough

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Long before the Famine, Doolough had its own complicated history with power. Sir Edmund Barrett - Baron of Irrus - lived in a castle here in 1585, knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for his loyalty to the English Crown. His sons Edmund and Richard were sent to be raised in the househo...

Read more: Doolough on Qualla

Doolough: The Bingham Landlords and the Famine

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the potato blight arrived in 1845, the Bingham family were among the largest landowners at Doolough. Local memory of them is not kind. Evictions were widespread; the tenants, already weakened by hunger, were often turned out of their cottages and watched their homes pulled d...

Read more: Doolough on Qualla

Doolough: The Land League and the Reckoning

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Michael Davitt founded the Irish National Land League in 1879 to challenge the entire system of absentee landlordism, the people of the Doolough area were among its most committed supporters. The memory of the Famine evictions was still fresh in the 1880s; the Bingham name s...

Read more: Doolough on Qualla

Doolough: What the Coast Remembers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The coast at Doolough has always held what it was given. The merchant ships Thompson and Mitchell were both wrecked here in the nineteenth century; the coastguard boat Lee was also lost. In the 1940s the Thelma drifted ashore at Doolough Point with a cargo of coal; pieces of that...

Read more: Doolough on Qualla