Achillbeg
Achillbeg is a small island located off the southern tip of Achill Island in County Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland. It sits in Clew Bay, separated from the larger Achill Island by a narrow sound. The island is small — roughly one kilometre long — and is today entirely uninhabited, though it once sustained a modest fishing and farming community. Its remoteness, dramatic coastal scenery, and poignant human history make it one of the more quietly compelling places along the Wild Atlantic Way, even if relatively few visitors make the effort to reach it.
The island was permanently inhabited until 1965, when its last remaining residents were evacuated to the mainland. At its peak in the nineteenth century, Achillbeg supported a community of several dozen people who lived by fishing and small-scale agriculture. The evacuation followed years of population decline, aging demographics, and the practical hardships of island life without modern infrastructure. The ruins of the old settlement remain on the island, giving it the melancholy atmosphere common to Ireland's abandoned island communities — places like Inishark or the Great Blasket — where you can walk among the shells of stone cottages and feel the weight of lives once lived there.
The physical character of Achillbeg is rugged and elemental. The island is largely composed of rocky grassland and bog, with dramatic cliffs on its ocean-facing sides and a slightly more sheltered shoreline facing Achill Sound. A small sandy beach can be found on its eastern side. Seabirds nest on the cliffs and are often seen wheeling overhead. On a clear day the views across to the mountains of Achill Island — particularly Croaghaun and Slievemore — are breathtaking. The island is quiet in the most profound sense: no roads, no people, just wind, birds, and the sound of the Atlantic.
The surrounding landscape is spectacular. Achill Island itself, Ireland's largest island, lies just to the north and is accessible by road bridge from the mainland. Clew Bay, strewn with drumlins and small islands, stretches out to the east. The Corraun Peninsula lies across the sound to the southeast. The whole area sits within one of the most scenically dramatic corners of Ireland, with the Nephin Beg mountain range visible to the northeast. The wider region has associations with Grace O'Malley, the legendary sixteenth-century pirate queen, whose territory encompassed these western waters.
Access to Achillbeg requires a boat, as there is no regular ferry service. Visitors typically arrange private boat trips from the southern end of Achill Island, near the village of Achill Sound or from Purteen Harbour. Local boatmen sometimes offer crossings during the summer months, but this is informal and requires enquiry on the ground. The crossing itself is short, only a matter of minutes in calm weather, but the sound can be choppy and the trip should only be attempted in reasonable conditions. There are no facilities whatsoever on the island — no toilets, no shelter, no shops — so visitors must bring everything they need and take all litter away with them.
The best time to visit is between May and September, when weather conditions are most likely to be cooperative and the days are long enough to explore at leisure. July and August offer the greatest chance of calm seas for the boat crossing. That said, the west of Ireland is famously changeable, and visitors should check forecasts carefully. The island is not suitable for young children or those with limited mobility given the rough terrain and the logistics of getting on and off a boat on an exposed shoreline.
One fascinating detail about Achillbeg is that it was the birthplace of Heinrich Böll's Ireland, in a manner of speaking. The German Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll visited the nearby Achill Island repeatedly from the 1950s onwards and wrote his celebrated Irish Journal partly about this corner of Mayo, capturing its light, its poverty, and its haunting beauty. While Böll's house was on Achill rather than Achillbeg itself, the abandoned island fits perfectly into the landscape he described. Achillbeg stands as a small but evocative monument to the long history of island depopulation along Ireland's western seaboard — a pattern driven by famine, emigration, and the grinding difficulty of sustaining life on the Atlantic fringe.