Béal Carra · Co. Mayo
A ruined house, a marl lake, and the landscape that made a novelist.
Belcarra sits on the north-west shore of Lough Carra, a few miles from Castlebar and a long way from anywhere that advertises itself. The village is small - a crossroads, a church, a GAA pitch, a scatter of houses along the shore road. The lake is the reason anyone comes.
Lough Carra is a marl lake, which means the limestone dissolves into the water and makes it alkaline, shallow, and unusually clear. The bottom is white. On a still day in May the surface looks almost tropical, which is not a word that earns itself often in County Mayo. The trout fishing is serious - the mayfly hatch in late May draws anglers who have been booking the same week for a decade. Boats go out from the western shore. The wind decides everything.
Moore Hall stands empty on the eastern shore, a Georgian mansion burned by Anti-Treaty forces in February 1923. George Moore, one of the more significant Irish novelists of the nineteenth century, was born here in 1852. His father John Moore Moore had built it in 1795 on the proceeds of a Spanish wine business. George left Mayo young, went to Paris to learn to paint, stayed to write instead, and came back rarely. The house was burned a year after he died. The walls still stand in the forestry. Coillte manages the land; the ruin is accessible on foot.
The connection to the Boycott episode is indirect but real. Father John O'Malley of The Neale - the priest who actually coined the word 'boycott' in a parlour conversation with an American journalist in late October 1880 - ministered to the parishes around Lough Carra. The tenants who withdrew labour from Captain Boycott's Lough Mask estate that autumn were from this same landscape. The land reform the episode accelerated changed every farm in it.
