Attraction in County Mayo

Ballintubber Abbey in County Mayo is one of the most remarkable ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, a medieval abbey church that has been in continuous liturgical use for over eight hundred years without interruption, a claim that very few religious buildings anywhere in Europe can match. The abbey was founded in 1216 by Cathal O'Connor, King of Connacht, for the Augustinian Canons, and despite the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, despite periods of suppression and persecution of Catholic worship, and despite the long rooflessness of much of the building, Mass has been celebrated at Ballintubber in every century since its foundation. The abbey building itself is a substantial piece of early thirteenth-century Hiberno-Romanesque and early Gothic architecture, retaining its cruciform plan, the round-arched doorway of the west front, the lancet windows and the cloister garth around which the canons' domestic buildings were arranged. The nave was reroofed and restored in the twentieth century and is now used for regular worship, while the ruined sections of the monastery complex have been partially consolidated and interpreted for visitors. The combination of working church and ancient ruin gives the site a dual character that is both historically evocative and practically alive. Ballintubber Abbey stands at the eastern end of Tóchar Phádraig, the ancient pilgrimage route to Croagh Patrick, the holy mountain of the west of Ireland where St Patrick is traditionally believed to have fasted for forty days. The route connecting the abbey to the mountain summit has been walked by pilgrims for over a thousand years, and a programme of waymarking and path improvement has made the Tóchar Phádraig a designated walking route of thirty kilometres through the heart of County Mayo. Beginning a pilgrimage walk at the abbey and ending it on the summit of Croagh Patrick gives the journey a historical resonance that is unique in the Irish landscape. The landscape of west Mayo surrounding the abbey is characterised by the wide, flat plains of the Castlebar district with the hills of Connemara and the distinctive profile of Croagh Patrick visible to the west, a setting that anchors the abbey firmly in its geographical and spiritual context.

The Ceide Fields on the north Mayo coast near Ballycastle is the most extensive prehistoric landscape in the world, a Neolithic farming system of field walls, house sites and megalithic tombs buried beneath the blanket bog of the north Mayo uplands approximately 5,500 years ago and preserved intact beneath the peat in a completeness impossible on any surface site. The fields were discovered in the 1930s by a local schoolteacher and subsequently excavated over several decades by archaeologist Seamas Caulfield, revealing a system of enclosed fields extending over approximately 12 square kilometres in a regular pattern that demonstrates the organised agricultural society of the Irish Neolithic. The Ceide Fields Visitor Centre, perched dramatically on the clifftop above the Atlantic with views of the north Mayo coast extending to the Belmullet Peninsula, provides the interpretation and the context for understanding a site that is largely invisible on the surface. The probing of the bog with iron rods to map the buried walls, the principal technique of the excavation programme, is demonstrated to visitors and the evidence recovered from beneath the peat, including the walls themselves and the pollen record of the ancient agricultural landscape, brings the Neolithic world of north Mayo into vivid focus. The coastal cliffs below the visitor centre are among the most dramatic on the Mayo coast, the horizontal limestone strata dropping vertically to the sea in a series of cliff faces that provide breeding habitat for a variety of seabirds and some of the finest coastal scenery available on the Wild Atlantic Way.