Qualla: Michael Davitt Bridge

Michael Davitt Bridge: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P L Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Most bridges promise permanence. The Michael Davitt Bridge promises to move. Once or twice a day, a single operator turns a key, traffic stops on the R319, and 390 tonnes of steel and concrete swing open across Achill Sound to let a sailboat pass. Then it closes again, and Achill Island - the largest island off the Irish coast - is reconnected to the Corraun Peninsula and the County Mayo mainland. The bridge that lets the island be an island is named for a man who spent his life arguing that Irish tenants should not be cast off the land beneath their feet.

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Image: P L Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Michael Davitt Bridge: A Fenian's Bridge

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kiran Madhusudhanan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Michael Davitt was a strange choice for a bridge namesake by Victorian standards. He had lost an arm in a Lancashire cotton mill at age eleven, served seven years in English prisons as a Fenian, and founded the Irish National Land League in 1879 to challenge the very landlords wh...

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Image: Kiran Madhusudhanan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Michael Davitt Bridge: Three Bridges, One Crossing

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jamip29, CC BY-SA 4.0. The 1887 bridge served Achill for 60 years before motor traffic finally ground it down. In 1947 the Mayo County Council commissioned J & C McGloughlin of Dublin to replace it, and the result - completed in 1949 - was at the time the largest bridge project ever undertaken by an Ir...

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Image: Jamip29 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Michael Davitt Bridge: Island, Peninsula, Island Again

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michelle Owner of the Squishy from Denver, CC BY 2.0. There is something quietly philosophical about a swing bridge. Achill is by every meaningful measure an island - 148 square kilometres of bog, cliff, and Atlantic shoreline - but for most of the day it is functionally a peninsula, joined to Corraun by an asphalt seam. When the br...

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Image: Michelle Owner of the Squishy from Denver | CC BY 2.0

Michael Davitt Bridge: Standing Where Davitt Stood

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Lucas, CC BY-SA 2.0. The west end of the bridge lands on Achill Island; the east end on the mainland at Achill Sound village. On either approach, the granite hills of the Corraun Peninsula and the long quartzite ridge of Slievemore frame the view. The current span - white-painted, cable-stayed, moder...

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Image: John Lucas | CC BY-SA 2.0