Around 1707, a Cromwellian named Thomas Bournes was granted Rossport and neighbouring Muingnabo by Arthur Shaen. The family settled in the townland by mid-century and became the local Protestant landlords for two centuries. By the standards of nineteenth-century Ireland the Bournes treated their tenants relatively well. When famine struck in the 1840s, the family wrote to the Bishop of Killala asking for relief and distributed meal and potatoes to their tenants. The Society of Friends - Quakers from England and America - sent food to the Bournes estate, and Mrs Bournes rang a bell from the dwelling each day when porridge and soup were ready. They also set up a school taught in Irish, used mostly for proselytising elsewhere, but here primarily to teach reading. The Bournes returned to London by 1881. Their old house later became the police barracks, then a Gael Linn college, and finally part of the Colaiste Chomain secondary school.

In 1893, an Englishman called Allan Sutherland arrived in Rossport in extravagant style. He travelled with servants, gamekeepers, dogs, guns, whiskey, wine, and fishing tackle, and he announced himself as Captain Sutherland of the Argyll Highlanders and the 5th Lancers. The shopkeepers of Belmullet extended him credit, delighted to host so distinguished a visitor. He moved into the empty Rossport House without the Bournes' permission - he had found the property in The Field magazine - and paid nobody. He bought horses on trial and quietly sold them on to Dublin for £10 each. The law caught up with him in time. He pleaded guilty to horse stealing and was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. The court heard that he had inherited over £4,000 and gambled and squandered the entire amount on horses. He left Rossport with nothing but a reputation.

Around 1900, the Congested Districts Board considered bridging Sruth Fada Conn Bay between Rossport and Glengad. The current is fierce there and dangerous for boats. The secretary outlined two possible designs: a wooden bridge under Rossport House for £1,000, or a suspension bridge a little below the existing ferry for £700. Nothing happened. In 1914, the parish priest Fr Timlin tried again. He had timing's bad luck: the First World War broke out, the government had other things on its mind, and the bridge was shelved. Sruth Fada Conn Bay is still unbridged today. The ferry stopped running long ago. The boat from Rossport to Glengad is no longer needed because most journeys now run the long way round by road.

In 2007, a Rossport farmer named Willie Corduff was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize - sometimes called the Green Nobel - for his role in the opposition to the Corrib gas project. The prize honours grassroots environmental activists from each inhabited continent. Corduff was the European recipient, recognised for organising a campaign that began with five farmers locking their gates and grew into a years-long contest over how decisions get made in a small Gaeltacht parish. The struggle ran on. Risteard O'Domhnaill's 2010 documentary The Pipe followed the campaign and brought it to international film festivals. The pipeline was eventually built and the gas flowed. Whether the campaign succeeded or failed depends on what you think it was trying to do.

Robert Buchanan, a Scotsman, left his medical studies in Britain and arrived at Rossport Lodge in 1874. He never qualified as a doctor but practised informally, tending the sick of the townland with his wife. They were generous and well-loved. When their dog died, the villagers came in numbers to offer condolences. A man from neighbouring Glengad, watching this outpouring of grief over a dog, composed a song of mockery called Madadh Buchanan - Buchanan's Dog - ridiculing the people of Rossport for taking the loss so seriously. The song survives. It is the kind of small dispute, sung against neighbours over a small thing, that keeps the texture of a place alive long after the larger histories fade. The Bournes are gone. The pipeline is finished. The mocking song about a dead dog still exists.