Qualla: Fahamore

Fahamore: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a calm summer evening in Scraggane Bay, you can still see them - the long, low silhouettes of currachs, hulls of black canvas stretched over slender wooden ribs, drawn up on the strand or moored offshore. They look impossibly fragile. The trick is that they are not. The currach, or naomhog in Irish, is one of the oldest boat designs in Europe still in working use, and Fahamore is one of the last places on the western seaboard where they are still built, maintained, and raced. Every July, teams from Kerry to Galway gather here for the All-Ireland Currach racing regatta. The boats they race are the same shape monks crossed open water in fifteen hundred years ago. Fahamore is small - fifty houses and a pub - but it is connected to time in ways much larger places are not.

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Fahamore: An Fhaiche Mhor

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Irish name of the village, An Fhaiche Mhor, means simply 'the big green' - a reference to the open commons that once defined the settlement. Fahamore sits at the tip of the Maharees peninsula, the sandy spit that juts north between Brandon Bay and Tralee Bay on the Dingle Pen...

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Fahamore: The Night of the Big Wind

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Local oral history holds that the worst storm in living memory was the Night of the Big Wind in January 1839 - a hurricane that struck Ireland on the night of Epiphany and was, for nearly a century, the benchmark for catastrophe. The wind tore roofs off houses, drowned cattle, le...

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Fahamore: Lobster, Salmon, and the Vivier Trucks

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fahamore's pier on Scraggane Bay supports about twenty half-decked and decked fishing boats in the seven-to-fifteen-metre range. The catch is the catch you would expect on a western Atlantic coast: European lobster, spiny lobster, spider crab, edible crab, Atlantic salmon. Fishin...

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Fahamore: The Currach Yard

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The currach is a wooden-framed boat covered with canvas or tarred cloth - light enough for two men to lift, narrow enough to slip between rocks, seaworthy enough to handle Atlantic swell. Variants of the design go back at least three thousand years. The naomhog, the larger Kerry ...

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Fahamore: Coast and Wildlife

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The intertidal zone around Fahamore is rich. Lugworms leave their casts in the sand at low tide; local anglers dig them for bass bait. Kelp and several wracks - bladder, serrated - drape the rocks. Dilisc, sea lettuce, carrageen moss. The seabirds include gulls, shags, cormorants...

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