Qualla: Turbot Island

Turbot Island: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The old houses still cluster along the north shore of Turbot, where the landings were easiest and the wind broke first against the rocks. Walk the road that cuts the island east to west and you can read the shape of the community that lived here: stone walls dividing potato beds, doors facing south for the sun, gable ends turned to the prevailing Atlantic gale. In 1978 the last residents packed up and crossed to the mainland for good. Inis Toirbirt - Turbot Island - went quiet, and the houses began their slow second life as holiday cottages for people who come precisely for that quiet.

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Turbot Island: Off the Cleggan Shore

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Turbot lies just off the Connemara coast, west of the Aird Mhor Peninsula and south of Inishturk South, in the channel of bays and skerries that separates Clifden from Cleggan. The island is small - a few hundred acres of grass and exposed rock - and a single road runs across its...

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Turbot Island: The Last Boat

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The story of small western islands in twentieth-century Ireland tends to follow the same arc: the school closes, the priest comes less often, the young people leave for Galway or Boston, and eventually the calculation simply stops working. Turbot's last residents left in 1978, la...

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Turbot Island: Houses Without Smoke

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What is left feels less like ruin than pause. Several of the cottages on the north side have been refurbished, their stone walls repointed, slate replaced over thatch, and they let in summer; smoke rises again from their chimneys in July and August. But the rest of the island hol...

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Turbot Island: The Western Skerries

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Turbot sits within a constellation of small islands that thin out toward the open Atlantic - High Island, Friar Island, Inishturbot's near neighbour Inishturk South, and Omey Island just to the southeast, reachable across a tidal strand at low water. The fishing here was once exc...

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