County Mayo Guide (Maigh Eo)
“The Heather County” - in the province of Connacht. County town: Castlebar.
Croagh Patrick, Achill Island and the wild Atlantic coast.
Big, wild and beautiful, Mayo runs along the Atlantic in the north-west. Its landmarks are the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick, climbed by pilgrims for 1,500 years, dramatic Achill Island, and the Marian shrine at Knock. A county of bog, mountain and empty beaches, it carries the memory of the Famine in its very landscape.
Few counties carry the weight of Irish history quite like Mayo. Its name comes from Maigh Eo, the plain of the yew trees, but its story is written in stone and bog: the Céide Fields on the north coast preserve the most extensive Stone Age field system known anywhere in the world, farmed some 6,000 years ago and then sealed beneath blanket bog. Later centuries were harder. Mayo was among the counties most devastated by the Great Famine, and mass emigration scattered its people from Cleveland to Coventry, which is why so many of the diaspora trace a line back to parishes around Ballina, Westport and Erris.
The landscape is the wildest in Connacht: the fjord of Killary Harbour on the Galway border, the sheer sea cliffs of Achill, the vast empty boglands of Erris, and the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick rising above Clew Bay and its scatter of drumlin islands. The county was the crucible of the Land War, launched from Irishtown in 1879, and the word boycott itself was coined here, after Lough Mask land agent Captain Charles Boycott. Today tourism, agriculture and a cluster of pharmaceutical employers around Castlebar and Westport anchor the economy, while Mayo GAA supporters remain famous for hope in the face of heartbreak.
Cities, towns and villages in Mayo
- Castlebar - The county town and administrative heart of Mayo, remembered for the Races of Castlebar in 1798, when French and Irish forces routed a British garrison.
- Westport - A rare planned Georgian town laid out in the 1780s, sitting at the foot of Croagh Patrick and repeatedly voted among the best places to live in Ireland.
- Ballina - North Mayo's biggest town, world-famous for salmon fishing on the River Moy and the home place of President Mary Robinson.
- Knock - Village transformed by the 1879 apparition witnessed by fifteen local people, now an international Marian shrine visited by around a million pilgrims a year.
- Keel (Achill) - Achill Island's main village, strung along a sweeping three-kilometre beach beneath the Minaun Cliffs.
- Dooagh (Achill) - Achill village near Keem Bay where ocean rower Don Allum came ashore in 1987, and whose vanished beach famously reappeared overnight in 2017.
- Belmullet - The market town of remote Erris, gateway to the Mullet Peninsula, the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht and some of Europe's darkest night skies.
- Cong - Picture-postcard village on the Galway border where John Ford filmed The Quiet Man in 1951, beside the five-star Ashford Castle estate.
- Foxford - Moy-side town known for its woollen mills, founded in 1892 and still weaving, and as the birthplace of Admiral William Brown.
- Claremorris - Busy rail-junction town in south Mayo that grew as a market and transport hub for the surrounding plains.
Famous people from Mayo
- Mary Robinson - Ballina-born barrister who became Ireland's first female President in 1990 and later UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
- Grace O'Malley (Gráinne Mhaol) - The 16th-century pirate queen of Clew Bay who commanded her own fleet and famously met Elizabeth I face to face in 1593.
- Michael Davitt - Founder of the Land League, born in Straide in 1846 and evicted with his family as a child, an experience that shaped the Land War he led.
- Admiral William Brown - Foxford emigrant who founded the Argentine Navy and is honoured as a national hero of Argentina, with over a thousand streets there bearing his name.
- Martin Sheridan - Bohola-born athlete who won five Olympic gold medals for the United States in the early 1900s as one of the famed Irish Whales.
- Margaret Burke Sheridan - Castlebar-born soprano who became one of the great Madama Butterfly interpreters at La Scala and was dubbed the Empress of Ireland by Toscanini's Milan.
- John MacBride - Westport-born republican, executed after the 1916 Rising, husband of Maud Gonne and father of Nobel laureate Seán MacBride.
- Enda Kenny - Castlebar politician who served as Taoiseach from 2011 to 2017, the longest-serving Fine Gael leader in the office.
- Louis Walsh - Kiltimagh-born music manager behind Boyzone and Westlife and a long-running judge on The X Factor.
- Sally Rooney - Castlebar-raised novelist whose books Normal People and Conversations with Friends made her one of the most acclaimed writers of her generation.
Did you know?
- The Céide Fields near Ballycastle are the most extensive Stone Age field system in the world, walled farmland roughly 6,000 years old preserved under blanket bog.
- Achill is Ireland's largest offshore island, joined to the mainland by a bridge since 1887.
- Mayo footballers have not won the All-Ireland senior title since 1951 despite reaching numerous finals, giving rise to the famous legend of the 'curse of 51'.
- Ireland West Airport Knock opened in 1985 on a foggy boggy hilltop after a campaign by local parish priest Monsignor James Horan, and now handles hundreds of thousands of passengers a year.
- On Reek Sunday, the last Sunday of July, thousands of pilgrims climb Croagh Patrick, some barefoot, continuing a pilgrimage tradition well over a thousand years old.
- The word boycott entered the English language in Mayo in 1880, when the community around Lough Mask ostracised land agent Captain Charles Boycott.
- The Great Western Greenway, running 42 kilometres from Westport to Achill along a disused railway, was Ireland's first great off-road greenway when it fully opened in 2011.
- In 1987 Don Allum landed at Dooagh on Achill to become the first person to row the Atlantic in both directions.
Places to visit in Mayo
- Croagh Patrick - Ireland’s holy mountain, climbed by pilgrims for 1,500 years.
- Westport - A charming heritage town beneath Croagh Patrick.
Surnames from Mayo: Walsh · Burke · Moran · Higgins · Conway · Costello · Jennings · Browne · Barrett · O'Dowd · Mulligan · Ruane