Qualla: Island Eddy

Island Eddy: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph McGinley, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two people were still living on Island Eddy in early December 1980. Then there were none. The last residents of a community that had been there since at least the early Middle Ages walked off the island and the houses went quiet. Forty-one roofed buildings stood in the village at the eastern end in 1842. Today the stone walls stand without roofs, the eastern stump of a sixteenth-century castle is buried in a boundary wall, and Eliza Murphy's gravestone - seventeen months old when she died in April 1827 - still leans in the small Children's Burial Ground at the village edge.

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Image: Joseph McGinley | CC BY-SA 2.0

Island Eddy: Not Eddy Island

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pjgoslyng, CC BY-SA 4.0. Always Island Eddy, never the other way round. The official placenames commission of Ireland enshrines it - Oileán Eide, Island Eddy, no debating the word order. The island sits in the inner reaches of Galway Bay, on the eastern side, seven kilometres north-north-west of Kinvara....

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Image: Pjgoslyng | CC BY-SA 4.0

Island Eddy: A Village by the Sea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jessica Hynes, CC BY-SA 2.0. The earliest documented reference comes from 1225, when Murtogh O'Brien and the English of Desmond raided Hy-Fiachra so thoroughly that the chronicler claimed they left not a four-footed beast from Island Eddy to Athenry. A castle was here by 1552 - a property deed between Richar...

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Image: Jessica Hynes | CC BY-SA 2.0

Island Eddy: Famine and the Long Decline

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rhiannon Kavanagh, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 1841 census recorded 125 people on Island Eddy. Ten years later, after the Great Famine of 1845-49, that community had been halved. National pattern, local tragedy. The population recovered a little through the 1870s, then began the long slow contraction that took most of the...

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Image: Rhiannon Kavanagh | CC BY-SA 2.0

Island Eddy: The Nausts of North Mallmhuir

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pjgoslyng, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the south shore of a narrow inlet known as North Mallmhuir, archaeologists have identified fifteen definite boat nausts - hollows in the shoreline carved to cradle and protect wooden boats - along 115 metres of coast. Plus a possible sixteenth. Four jetties, numerous mooring p...

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Image: Pjgoslyng | CC BY-SA 3.0

Island Eddy: Eliza Murphy's Grave

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Monteguy - French naval surveyor, Public domain. The Children's Burial Ground sits at the southern fringe of the ruined village. One gravestone bears an inscription: Eliza Murphy Who died 8 April AD 1827 aged 17 Months. The poet Moya Cannon, working out of Kinvara, wrote two poems for her collection Hands in 2011 - 'Nausts' and...

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Image: Monteguy - French naval surveyor | Public domain