Jim Sheridan, Richard Harris, 1990
The Field
The film The Field — adapted from John B. Keane's 1965 play about a land dispute that ends in violence — was filmed partly in Leenaun in 1990. Jim Sheridan directed. Richard Harris played Bull McCabe, the old farmer willing to murder for the acre he has rented and worked and considered his own. The pub scenes were shot here. The village was real. That realness — the smallness, the grey water, the mountains — made the script land harder than any set design could have.
Ireland's glacial fjord
Killary Harbour
Killary Harbour is the only glacial fjord in Ireland — a 16-kilometre trough carved by a glacier in the last ice age, now filled with Atlantic seawater. The harbour is shared: Leenaun is on the Galway side, but the south shore runs into Mayo. Mweelrea mountain — 814 metres, Connacht's highest — sits across the water and is visible from every window on the harbour side. On clear days the rock face is clean and steep. In cloud, it vanishes entirely.
South shore and Foher
The walks
The south shore of Killary can be walked from Leenaun toward Rosroe — a straightforward way along the water with the mountain wall on the far side. Further south, if you have a half-day, is the walk to Foher, an abandoned famine village. The ruins are still there — cottages, a schoolhouse — frozen in the moment when the people left or died. The mountain holds the whole valley. The silence holds it too.