On 6 February 1921, four young men climbed into a boat at Letterard and pushed off for Roundstone, across Bertraghboy Bay. They were Old IRA volunteers, headed to a battalion meeting during the Irish War of Independence, and the meeting was urgent enough to make the crossing in difficult weather. A violent storm caught them midway. The boat foundered off Inishlaken Island. All four drowned. A memorial stone now stands near the mole at Moyrus beach, set into ground that looks out toward the water that took them. It is the kind of stone you can walk past without noticing - until you read the names.
The word Letterard, in Irish, means 'high area' - and the townland is in fact set on elevated land on the Errismore peninsula in west Connemara, in the parish of Moyrus, just north of Carna. Bertraghboy Bay opens to the west, with Roundstone visible across it on clear days. To the east the country rolls inland toward the Owenmore River. Along the bay edge runs a cliff called Aill Da Bhinn, 'the cliff with the two peaks'. These names are not just labels. They are the working vocabulary of people who fished, farmed, and travelled this landscape long enough to need words for every distinguishing feature, and Letterard is one of the corners of Ireland where the language that created those words is still spoken in daily life. The townland sits within the Connemara Gaeltacht.
Before the Great Famine struck Ireland in 1845, Letterard had a population of roughly 800 people. By the end of the famine, that number had collapsed to just over a hundred. Today the population stands at 103 - essentially the same number that survived the famine, two centuries on. This is not coincidence. The famine did not just kill people. It hollowed out the demographic capacity of places like Letterard, sending the survivors to America in waves of emigration that continued long after the potato crop had recovered. The land that had supported 800 people in 1845 has never again supported that many, because the people who would have raised the next generation of locals were instead raising the next generation of Boston Irish.
For a small townland, Letterard has produced a remarkable cast. Johnny Mhairtin Learai MacDonnacha became one of the great sean-nos singers - the old, ornamented, unaccompanied Irish singing tradition - and his recordings travelled as far as Scotland, where the related Gaelic singing tradition recognised him as kin. Margaret Craven, born in Letterard, moved to America as a teenager, made a life there, and in 2009 was elected to the Maine state senate. She returned to Letterard in 2010 to visit Eileen Connelly, the wife of her late brother Josie, who had himself died in another boating tragedy off the Carna coast. The two threads of Letterard's story - the boats, and the people who leave - intersect in her family in a way that is almost unbearably specific. A senator. A drowned brother. A sister returning. A village of a hundred and three.
Located at 53.36 N, 9.87 W, on the Errismore peninsula in west Connemara, County Galway. The townland sits on elevated ground above Bertraghboy Bay, with the Aill Da Bhinn cliff marking the bay edge. Across the bay lies Roundstone; to the south, Carna village. Nearest airports: Connemara Regional (EICA) at Inverin, about 30 km east; Galway (EICM) further east. Expect Atlantic weather with frequent low cloud over the higher ground.