Blacksod Bay by land and sea

- July 17, 2021

Fog over Clew Bay as seen from Mulranny.

We had visited Blacksod Bay and Elly Bay by sea before but had never actually gone ashore. Yesterday, we needed to get cow matting from the manufacturer, Cow Comfort, in Belmullet. So we stopped in Ballycroy to see Marie Wood's art exhibition in the Ginger &Wild Cafe, went on to Belmullet picked up the cow mats and then decided to go to the end of the road at Blacksod Bay. It was a beautiful day for a car ride and a gander. On the way there, we saw a most extraordinary sight -- fog or low cloud over a segment of Clew Bay, likely an inversion as the weather had suddenly turned quite warm.

Marie's art exhibition was superb. Her work is always impressive, but this selection I found especially appealing. My favourite piece was called 'Let there be light' but I loved them all. The views from the Cafe and visitor centre were beautiful but we didn't take the time to walk the loop as it was a bit breezy and we wanted to be sure to get the cow mats before they close at 5 pm.

The Mullet Peninsula is located in northwest part of County Mayo. The road to Belmullet Town leads through a narrow strip of land which separates Blacksod Bay and Broad Haven Bay. The peninsula is about 33 km long, and at its widest point is 12 km and the narrowest only 50 m. The western coast has craggy coastline, and wind from the Atlantic blows so strongly, that there is almost no vegetation except grass. It is here that the Spanish Armada was caught in a ferocious storm that sand most of the fleet. On the seabed of Blacksod Bay rests the wreck of the large Spanish galleon "La Rata Santa Maria Encoronada" which sank in 1588.

Belmullet, our destination, is a coastal Gaeltacht town with a population of just over 1,000 on the Mullet Peninsula in the barony of Erris in County Mayo, Ireland. It is the commercial and cultural heart of the barony of Erris, which has a population of almost 10,000. The entire Mullet peninsula was very interesting. It is all very deep Gaeltacht and all signage was in Gaelic.The architecture was different along this sparsely populated route from much of the rest of Mayo. Many of the houses looked rather new and diversely designed, which is contrary to Mayo CoCo's usual permissions. The land is somewhat bleak and marked by sand flats, bays, bogland, and the occasional monoculture forestry project. It's relatively flat but surrounded across the waters by the mountains and hills of North Mayo and Achill Island. Quite beautiful but desperately remote feeling.

It looked like there were quite a few holiday makers and we surmised that many of the homes we saw were holiday lets. After securing the mats at Cow Comfort (quite the experience), we decided to continue on to the end of the road at Blacksod. That was really interesting. We saw the visitor moorings in place and a very large sailboat anchored off Elly Bay. Many of the fishing boats were still on the hard. We learned about the Inishkeas, the Whaling Station and their desertion from billboards on the pier.

The massive pier was built to accommodate ocean crossing liners that were to connect with Halifax and Boston. A railway was planned to terminate in Blacksod with an impressively designed terminal building. It was all a plan hatched by the British government to connect London with the Americas, using ships across the waters and rail across the land. The railway got a far as Ballina but sadly never made it to Blacksod. What a different place it would have been if it had.

The old pub Heneghan's just down from the lighthouse is now closed. A new pub around the corner, Una's, closed on March 15 in 2020 as the pandemic reared it's head and remains closed now. The lighthouse itself is a lovely structure made from local stone that was shipped to London for construction of government buildings there. The lighthouse served to warn the WWII commanders of approaching weather which changed the date of D-Day. And there is a plaque commemorating the lives of the crew that lost their lives when the helicopter crashed on Blackrock instead of Blacksod.

There are also billboards describing the biodiversity and the adversity of life on the Inishkeas, which can be reached by boat from Blacksod. All in all, it was a welcome diversion on a fine day in the West of Ireland.