An Geata Mór · Co. Mayo
The road splits here. Atlantic on three sides, a landlord's gate long gone.
Binghamstown is a small clutch of houses and a crossroads at the narrowing waist of the Mullet Peninsula, northwest Mayo. The Atlantic is on three sides. On a clear day the Inishkea Islands sit offshore to the west, abandoned since 1934, low and dark on the water. To the east, Blacksod Bay is calm where the ocean is not. The place is as far from the centre of Ireland as it is possible to get while still standing on the island.
The Irish name - An Geata Mór, the big gate - tells the only story that matters here. In the 1820s, Major Denis Bingham, who had built his estate village here in 1796, put a toll gate across the road when the rival town of Belmullet started drawing his merchants away. Farmers moving livestock south paid to pass. It did not save the village. Belmullet won, the gate came down, and the monthly fairs that Bingham had established with such confidence wound down by the 1830s. The English name stuck; the Irish one kept the record.
What remains is the landscape and the language. Cross Beach takes the Atlantic swell on the western shore, good for surfing, better for watching. Annagh Strand on the eastern shore is one of the finest beaches in Mayo and almost no one has found it. The Erris Gaeltacht covers this whole south Mullet - Irish is the working tongue in the school, at the post box, at the few doors where you might knock. It is not performed. Come without expectations and it will show you something real.
There is no pub. There is no hotel. There is no restaurant. Belmullet is eight kilometres north and it has all of those things. Binghamstown has the road, the gate that isn't there any more, two beaches, and the light on the water in the evening. That is enough.
