Qualla: Tory Island

Tory Island: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1994, Neville Presho came back from New Zealand and his house was gone. Just gone. Not damaged, not collapsed - vanished, as if Tory Island had decided to revise its own geography. Neighbors offered theories: a great storm, mysterious lights in the sky. The local police had no comment. The psychiatrist a frustrated Presho consulted suggested he might be imagining things. It took until 2009 - fifteen years - before a civil court finally pinned the disappearance on a fellow islander who, as luck would have it, happened to own a mechanical digger. This is Tory: a five-kilometre sliver of rock 11 km off the northwest coast of Donegal, Irish-speaking, weather-battered, and so committed to its own logic that for a generation it managed to make an entire house unhappen.

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Tory Island: The Hunted

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name comes from the old Irish toraí, meaning the hunted - outlaws, bandits, the kind of men who needed a place no one else wanted. After Cromwell broke royalist resistance in 17th-century Ireland, the loyalist remnants who fled to the hills became toraidhe, and the slur event...

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Tory Island: Standing Stones, Standing Towers

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the pier at West Town stands the Tau Cross, 1.9 metres of mica slate carved into a T-shape probably in the 12th century. Tau crosses are rare in the west of Ireland, most associated with St Anthony of Egypt and his desert hermits. How one ended up on a Donegal island has spawn...

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Tory Island: The Once and Future King

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tory has a king. Not metaphorically - actually. The position is not hereditary but conferred by popular assent, and its most recent holder was Patsai Dan Mag Ruaidhri, known as Patsy Dan Rodgers, who held the title until his death in 2018. Patsy Dan led the 1970s resistance to ev...

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Tory Island: How to Get There, and Why

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Tory Ferry sails from Magheroarty on the mainland - a 45-minute crossing of open Atlantic, foot passengers only, often with a swell. The whole island is five kilometres long, walkable end to end on a single lane. There is no shop. The Creggan Restaurant burned down in 2015 an...

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