Qualla: St. Finian's Bay

St. Finian's Bay: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Patterson from Cork, Ireland, CC BY 2.0. The bay is a clean crescent, with one headland to the north and another to the south, and the open Atlantic filling the gap between them. From the pier at the middle of the curve you can see Puffin Island just offshore and, on a clear evening, the silhouettes of Skellig Michael and Little Skellig further out to sea. The wind is almost always doing something. On calm days, divers slip into the water here for trips out to the Skellig Rocks. On wilder days, the surfers at Glen's Beach get the bay to themselves. The patron saint who gives the place its name watched over an older traffic - monks rowing eight miles offshore to a rock that became one of the most famous monastic sites in the Christian west.

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Image: Anthony Patterson from Cork, Ireland | CC BY 2.0

St. Finian's Bay: The Saint and His Sea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Billinger, CC BY-SA 2.0. Saint Finan Cam, whose name the bay carries, may have been the founder of the first monastic oratory on Skellig Michael, directly opposite this shore. The early Irish saints were a numerous and not always easily separated company, and the records of Finan are thin enough that sch...

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Image: Jonathan Billinger | CC BY-SA 2.0

St. Finian's Bay: Layers of Stone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marathon, CC BY-SA 2.0. St. Finian's Bay is one of those small, intensely layered Irish landscapes. At Rathkerin, near the back of the bay, the remains of an earth fort still register in the ground. Souterrains - the underground stone passages that often appear under early medieval Irish farmsteads - ha...

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Image: Marathon | CC BY-SA 2.0

St. Finian's Bay: The Modern Bay

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stinglehammer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the bay sits on the Skellig Ring, the smaller and quieter alternative to the more famous Ring of Kerry. The Skellig Ring drive connects Portmagee at the northern end to Ballinskelligs at the southern end, and St. Finian's Bay lies on the open stretch between them. The pier ...

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Image: Stinglehammer | CC BY-SA 4.0

St. Finian's Bay: Light at the End of Europe

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Terryballard, CC BY-SA 3.0. St. Finian's Bay faces almost due west, which means it gets the full force of the Atlantic and the entire arc of evening light. Sunsets here have the quality that earlier generations of Irish writing tried to describe and largely failed - a yellow that goes orange that goes red t...

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Image: Terryballard | CC BY-SA 3.0