From a Clare farm to Paris fromageries
St Tola Goat's Cheese
Siobhán Ní Ghairbhith took over Inagh Farm in the late 1980s and began making fresh goat's cheese — a then-unfamiliar style in Ireland. The cheese won its first major award in the 1990s and the momentum never stopped. The farm eventually relocated production to Drumcullaun near the village to expand capacity. The St Tola range now includes fresh logs, organic varieties, aged rounds, and an ash-coated disc that turns up on Michelin-starred menus across Europe. Stockists include Neal's Yard Dairy in London and specialist shops in New York. The brand name honours a local eighth-century saint who founded the monastery at Dysert O'Dea — the same St Tola that gives the high cross at Corofin its name.
Ennis to the Atlantic coast
The N85 — a road with purpose
The N85 was built as the main overland route from Ennis to the Clare coast. Before that road existed, the mid-Clare townlands around Inagh were significantly more isolated — the bogs and drumlins between Ennis and Ennistymon made passage slow. The road changed the village's role: it became a junction-point on a route that now carries surfers, tourists, and dairy deliveries alike. The older crossroads pattern of the village still shows the road's historic weight — the church, the school, the small cluster of houses arranged around the junction in a way that says: this was always where you stopped.
Two parishes, one club, since 1903
Inagh-Kilnamona GAA
Inagh and Kilnamona merged their GAA activities early — the combined club has been a fixture in Clare football for over a century. Like most rural Clare clubs, it functions as a year-round social institution as much as a sporting one: the draw, the fundraiser, the underage training session on a wet Tuesday, the senior match that half the parish turns out for. Clare GAA has produced All-Ireland winners from small clubs like this one. The Inagh-Kilnamona pitch is on the edge of the village and has the specific quiet of a GAA ground in the off-season — very green, very empty, very Clare.
A rural Clare Catholic parish
The parish church
The Roman Catholic church at Inagh serves a wide rural parish — the kind that includes many more scattered farms than the village itself. Mid-Clare was among the areas hardest hit by the Great Famine; the population of the parishes around Inagh fell sharply between 1845 and 1851 through death and emigration. The church that stands today is a nineteenth-century building, a replacement for whatever came before. It functions as the main gathering point of the parish in the way that was universal across rural Ireland for a century and a half — and still, to a meaningful degree, is.