Qualla: Erris

Erris: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. El Comandante assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. The rocks along the beaches of Elly Bay and Annagh Head are pink and orange and shot through with stripes - and they used to be Canadian. Pieces of the same gneiss, the same exact rock layered the same way, sit on the eastern coast of Northern Canada more than three thousand kilometres west. The two were once joined as a single landmass. The Atlantic was not yet an ocean. Then the mid-Atlantic Ridge began to widen, the continents began to drift, and over hundreds of millions of years the rock split. Stand on Elly Bay today, pick up one of those striped stones, and you are holding a piece of a vanished world. Erris remembers things on a scale that humbles human history.

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. El Comandante assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Erris: The Blanket Bog

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Comhar, Public domain. Most of inland Erris is covered by Atlantic blanket bog, an acidic carpet that grows slowly across the landscape wherever the rainfall keeps the ground waterlogged. The pH runs between 3.5 and 4.2 - hostile to most plants but perfect for mosses, bryophytes, carnivorous sundews, a...

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Image: Comhar | Public domain

Erris: To Hell or to Connaught

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Comhar, Public domain. In the mid-seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell decreed that the native Irish who refused his authority would be sent to hell or to Connaught. Many came to Erris. The dispossessed worked thin soils on land held by the Bingham and Carter families, two of the major planted landlord...

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Image: Comhar | Public domain

Erris: The Children of Lir

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CeltBrowne, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the small uninhabited island of Inishglora, just off the Mullet Peninsula, tradition places the burial site of the Children of Lir. The story belongs to the oldest stratum of Irish myth: four siblings turned into swans by their jealous stepmother, condemned to spend nine hundr...

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Image: CeltBrowne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Erris: Rescue 116

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Comhar, Public domain. On 14 March 2017, an Irish Coast Guard Sikorsky S-92 helicopter, callsign Rescue 116, crashed into Blackrock Island off the Mayo coast while returning from a mission. All four crew died. The community of Erris mobilised for the search and recovery operation that followed - small ...

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Image: Comhar | Public domain

Erris: The Sea and the Wind

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Munifico, CC BY-SA 3.0. The coastline of Erris carries what many call the grandest sea cliffs in Ireland. Erris Head, the northernmost point of the Mullet Peninsula, marks one of the sea areas named in Met Eireann's weather forecasts - a name fishermen hear before every storm. There is no road to Erris ...

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Image: Munifico | CC BY-SA 3.0