Qualla: Glencullen, County Mayo

Glencullen, County Mayo: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 22 February 1931, a small mountain lake called Lough Boleynagee, perched 516 feet above sea level on the hillside above Glencullen Upper, slid down off its own bed. The lake didn't just overflow - it left the mountain entirely, carried along by tons of soft saturated bog that gave way beneath it. The wall of peat and water poured down the Glencullen river, picked up the bridge across it, and emptied itself into the valley. When the bog stopped moving, Lough Boleynagee was gone. The bottom that had once been hidden by water now lay open to the sky, scattered with dead trout. The brent geese that had wintered there for generations had to find somewhere else.

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Glencullen, County Mayo: The Booleying Glen

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Glencullen Upper is a long sheltered glen where the Glencullen river runs down into Carrowmore Lake. For centuries this was booleying ground - buaile, in Irish - where farmers from beyond the parish drove their cattle up each summer to fatten on the mountain pasture. People from ...

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Glencullen, County Mayo: The Famine Road

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The road from Glencullen to Bangor Erris was laid in 1847 during the Public Works for the Distress - the controversial relief schemes that gave starving people pickaxes and wages of pennies in exchange for building infrastructure that often led nowhere. This particular road cost ...

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Glencullen, County Mayo: Mr McNulty's School

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first record of formal teaching in Glencullen is from 1826, when a woman named Mary Shiels taught twenty-two pupils in any available place for a salary of four pounds a year. This was a hedge school - the informal Catholic alternative to the official Protestant-led system. In...

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Glencullen, County Mayo: The Evening Classes

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By 1888 the original schoolhouse had been replaced with a larger building accommodating sixty pupils. From 1903 to 1909, the school ran evening classes for twenty-two men over eighteen years old, each studying two subjects. The grant for the teacher came to £14.5.0 a year - a sma...

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Glencullen, County Mayo: What the Bog Remembers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Glencullen Lower and Glencullen Upper together cover almost five thousand acres of blanket bog, river valley, and small mountain - a vast space for the dozens of people who now live there. The bog itself is the largest archive of what has passed across this land: fossilised pine ...

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