Achill Island

Ireland's largest island

Achill (Irish Acaill) lies off the coast of County Mayo in the north west of Ireland and is the country's largest island. A short bridge at Achill Sound joins it to the mainland, yet it feels like another world: peat bogs, sheep on the slopes, sea cliffs among the highest in Europe, and an Atlantic that changes colour every day.

The island is part of the Gaeltacht, where the Irish language is still at home. It is thinly populated, and many families have relatives who, like Johnny, ended up in Cork, Dublin, England or further away. If you are from Achill, you stay from Achill.

Places worth knowing

• Keem Bay: an almost white sandy cove between steep green slopes, often called one of the finest beaches in Ireland. Part of the film The Banshees of Inisherin was shot here.
• Croaghaun: a mountain that drops straight into the sea. Its cliffs are among the highest sea cliffs in Europe.
• The Deserted Village at Slievemore: the stone ruins of an old village on the mountainside, a quiet place above Dugort bay.
• The Atlantic Drive and Kildavnet: a coast road looking out over Clew Bay, and a tower linked with the pirate queen Grace O'Malley.
• Keel and Dooagh: the villages with the pubs, the beaches and the surfers.

The German connection

Freiburg guests may already know Achill without realising it: the writer and Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll spent many summers on the island from the 1950s onwards, in a cottage near Dugort. His Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) has drawn generations of Germans to Ireland. The cottage is today a retreat for artists and writers.

The painter Paul Henry also lived on Achill for years and made the island's landscape of turf stacks, cottages and towering clouds famous across Ireland.

What comes with us to the pub

Not postcard nostalgia, but the attitude: guests are welcome as they are. A pint or a cup of tea, a seat by the fire, and time for a chat. If you know Achill, tell us at the bar. If you do not, Sarah will tell you.