Qualla: Rutland Island

Rutland Island: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1784, William Burton Conyngham decided to build a town on an empty Donegal island. He laid out streets. He built a fish-landing pier and a processing facility. He constructed business premises, residences, a post office, a school house. He called the new settlement Rutland, after the British politician then serving as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. For a few years it worked. Fishing boats put in, fish were salted and shipped, families settled and ran shops. Then the herring stopped coming. The catches collapsed. The shops closed one by one. Most of the residents left. The town that Conyngham had drawn on paper became, within a generation, a slow ruin on a small island most travellers had never heard of.

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Rutland Island: Inishmacadurn

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The island's original Irish name was Inishmacadurn. It sits in the maze of small islands between Burtonport on the mainland and Arranmore offshore, in the area of West Donegal called the Rosses. It is small, mostly granite, exposed to the Atlantic. The local population had used i...

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Rutland Island: Tarent Street

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The main street of the planned town was called Tarent Street, built in 1789. Photographs survive of what remains of it: stone buildings, walls partly tumbled, foundations visible in the turf. The town was designed on a grid, with separate residential and commercial blocks, in the...

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Rutland Island: When the Herring Left

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Atlantic herring stocks are notoriously variable. The shoals that had brought boats in to Rutland's pier through the 1780s and early 1790s simply ceased to appear in the same numbers. By the early 1800s, the catches were a fraction of what the town had been built for. The process...

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Rutland Island: Stepping Stone for Electricity

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mains electricity reached Rutland Island in 1957, but not for its residents. The cable ran across Rutland to continue on to Arranmore, where the larger inhabited island was being electrified as part of the Rural Electrification Scheme. Rutland received electricity because the eng...

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Rutland Island: Holiday Boom

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the first decade of the 2000s, Rutland Island experienced a small holiday-home boom. Several new cottages were built, joining the older converted residences, all serving as summer retreats for owners from the mainland and from farther afield. The island has no ferry service. O...

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