Qualla: Heir Island

Heir Island: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Podstawko, CC BY 4.0. The hamlet on Heir Island is called Paris. This is not a joke. It is the main residential area on a 2.5-kilometre island that had four hundred people on it in the 19th century and has somewhere between twenty-five and thirty now, and it was once the centre of the island's fishing trade -- the place where the day's catch came in, where the pilchards were pickled and barrelled, and where the lobster boats made up their nets. The name's origin is forgotten. The fishing is gone. But Paris is still on the map.

Read more: Heir Island on Qualla

Image: Podstawko | CC BY 4.0

Heir Island: Towelsail Yawls

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Podstawko, CC0. Before motorboats, lobsters around Heir Island were caught from a craft called the towelsail yawl -- a two-masted, gaff-rigged boat about thirty feet long, carrying a crew of three and a train of thirty or so willow lobster pots. The boats worked in convoys, multiple vessels rope...

Read more: Heir Island on Qualla

Image: Podstawko | CC0

Heir Island: Four Hundred to Thirty

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Podstawko, CC0. At its peak Heir Island carried about four hundred people. The McCarthys and the O'Neills are the surnames that everyone remembers; the O'Neills ran the post office. Life was fishing or farming, neither of which on a small Atlantic island made much of a living, and by the 19th ce...

Read more: Heir Island on Qualla

Image: Podstawko | CC0

Heir Island: Two Hundred Wildflowers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Podstawko, CC BY-SA 4.0. Heir is one of the seven inhabited West Cork islands. It has twenty-three beaches for an island measuring two and a half kilometres by one and a half, which is to say it is mostly beach. The largest, Trá Bán -- the Sandy Beach, on the eastern side facing Baltimore across the chan...

Read more: Heir Island on Qualla

Image: Podstawko | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heir Island: The MV Thresher

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D.Camier, CC BY-SA 4.0. The link to the mainland is the MV Thresher, a small ferry running from Cunnamore Pier on the mainland six times a day in summer, every two hours from 8am to 6pm. The service has been subsidised by the relevant Irish government department since 2003 and crossed its hundred-thousa...

Read more: Heir Island on Qualla

Image: D.Camier | CC BY-SA 4.0