Achill Island

Where it sits. Achill is the largest island off the Irish coast, about 148 square kilometres of bog, quartzite mountain and Atlantic cliff at the western end of County Mayo. It is joined to the mainland at Achill Sound by the Michael Davitt Bridge — the first crossing opened in 1887, and the present structure dates from 2008 — so it can be driven to, which sets it apart from every other island in this part of the country. Two mountains dominate: Slievemore, 671 metres, rising straight out of the bog on the north coast, and Croaghaun, 688 metres, at the far western end, whose seaward face falls in one sweep to the ocean and ranks among the highest sea cliffs in Europe. There is no road to the base of those cliffs; they can only be seen from the summit ridge or from a boat.

The story behind it. Achill's history is one of hard margins. On the southern slope of Slievemore lies the Deserted Village, roughly a hundred roofless stone houses in a single line along the hillside, occupied before the Famine and afterwards used only as a booley settlement — summer quarters while cattle grazed the high ground, a practice that survived here into the twentieth century. Charles Cunningham Boycott farmed at Corrymore House on the road to Keem before moving to Lough Mask, where his treatment by tenants in 1880 gave the language a new verb. From 1947 to the mid-1970s Purteen Harbour was the centre of a basking shark fishery: the sharks were taken in nets set across Keem Bay and rendered for liver oil, and several thousand were killed in the peak years. Heinrich Böll bought a cottage at Dugort in the 1950s and wrote Irisches Tagebuch out of it; the house now hosts writers in residence.

On screen. Achill provided roughly half of the fictional island in Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), sharing the work with Inishmore. Purteen Harbour is the most heavily used location in the film: Pádraic walks through it on his way to collect Colm at the start, drinks poitín with Dominic outside the shop set built at the harbour, brings his milk down to sell, and Siobhán collects her post there before taking the boat to the mainland. The cottage where Colm saws away at his fiddle was built on the cliffs above Keem Bay, and the beach below carries several of the film's turning points, including its last scene. Both cottages were sets, put up for the shoot and taken down afterwards, so the buildings themselves are gone — what remains is the ground they stood on, and it is entirely recognisable. The island's earlier screen life was largely documentary, including footage of the shark fishery that now serves as the only moving record of it.

What you actually see today. The Atlantic Drive loops the southern shore past Cloughmore and Ashleam Bay, where the road climbs and turns above a horseshoe cove — the single best short drive on the island. Keel village fronts Trawmore, a three-kilometre strand ending at the Minaun cliffs; Dugort and Dooagh have their own beaches, and Achill holds more Blue Flag strands than any comparable stretch of Irish coast. Walkers take the ridge from Keem over Moyteoge Head to Croaghaun, or the shorter climb to the Deserted Village and on to Slievemore's summit. Achill Henge, a ring of concrete uprights built without permission in 2011 on the bog above Pollagh, sits there still, unauthorised and oddly compelling. Surf schools operate at Keel; sea angling and blueway kayaking run from the sound.

Getting there and timing. From Westport it is about an hour by the N59 and R319, and roughly three hours from Galway. There is no ferry to arrange and no timetable to meet, which makes Achill an unusually easy island to visit and an unusually easy one to underestimate — the weather is Atlantic, and a clear morning at Keem can be a white-out by lunchtime. Accommodation concentrates in Keel, Dooagh and Achill Sound; much of it closes between November and March. Roads to the main beaches are surfaced with car parks at the top, but the cliff paths, the Deserted Village and Keem's flanking slopes are rough ground with steep drops and no barriers.