Bun na Coille · Co. Mayo
A one-street village that puts on the biggest show in north Mayo.
Bonniconlon - 'base of the wood' in Irish - sits on the R294 about eight kilometres east of Crossmolina, at the point where the north Mayo plains run up against the Ox Mountains. The village is small enough that you could walk its length in the time it takes to boil a kettle. Most of the year it earns that description honestly. One Monday in August, it does not.
The Bonniconlon Agricultural Show was first held in 1949 on the August Bank Holiday Monday, and it has not missed a year since. Thirty thousand people come for livestock competitions, showjumping, craft displays, and the specific sociability of a rural Irish show at full stretch. The prize fund runs to tens of thousands of euro. For a village this size, the logistics alone are a feat. The fact that it keeps happening, year after year, with that attendance, says something about how seriously the community takes the thing it started seventy-five years ago.
The Ox Mountains - Sliabh Gamh - rise immediately behind the village. Five waymarked walking routes thread up through bog and heather, from a 6km loop to a 20km ridge traverse. The Western Way, which runs coast to coast across the north of the country, passes through. Lough Talt, a mountain lake sitting on the Mayo-Sligo border, is the reward at the eastern end of the range. It is not a dramatic lake that announces itself. It just sits there, very still, with a hill behind it, which is its own recommendation.
The village was Kilgarvin before it was Bonniconlon - named for the church Saint Feichin founded here around 650 AD. The original Kilgarvin Cemetery is still in use. Masses are still said there on August 15th, the feast of the Assumption, continuing a Pattern tradition that predates any living resident by some margin. The name changed in the late nineteenth century during administrative reorganisation. The graveyard stayed put.
