Corroy
Corr Ráithe

The Wild Atlantic Way
STOP 03 / 03

Corr Ráithe · Co. Mayo

A mill townland on the Moy road, where the name outlasted the fort.

Corroy sits on the R310 between Ballina and Knockmore, about eight kilometres south of Ballina town. It is a townland, not a village — no pub, no shop, no cluster of houses that announces itself as a place. What it has is a position: on the west bank of the River Moy corridor, at the edge of Ballynahaglish parish, on a stretch of north Mayo farmland that has been continuously settled since people first understood what a defensible hill above a salmon river was worth.

The name says everything. Corr Ráithe means 'round-hill fort' in Irish — the ringfort that once commanded this ground is long gone, but the word for it survived every map-maker and every anglicisation. The parish it sits in, Ballynahaglish, takes its name from an ancient abbey: 'baile na haglaise', the town of the church. No record of that abbey survives beyond a few slight remains and the place-name itself. North Mayo has a way of preserving the memory of things while losing almost everything else about them.

By the mid-19th century, Corroy had earned a practical distinction: it held the only corn mill recorded in the entire civil parish. Griffith's Valuation of 1856 puts it here and nowhere else. Every farm family within range — and in a parish of over eleven thousand statute acres, that was a wide range — would have brought their grain along these roads to have it processed. The mill is gone too, but the land around it is still farmed, and the road south to Knockmore and Lough Conn still runs the same line it always has.

Coords

54° 3' 45" N, 9° 10' 41" W

01 / 03

At a glance.

Three things every local will eventually mention. Read these and you've already understood more than most day-trippers do.

01 The name

Corr Ráithe: the round-hill fort.

The Irish name records a ringfort that once sat on the elevated ground here, watching the River Moy below. The fort is gone. The name stayed.

Stories & lore → 02 The mill

The only corn mill in the parish.

Griffith's Valuation of 1856 records one corn mill in all of Ballynahaglish Civil Parish. It was here, at Corroy. Every farmer for miles brought their grain to this townland.

Stories & lore → 03 The lake

Lough Conn, ten minutes south.

Ireland's seventh-largest lake sits just down the R310. Brown trout, salmon, and Nephin mountain holding up the western sky. Corroy is on the road to all of it.

Getting there →

02 / 03

Stories & lore.

The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.

One corn mill. One townland.

The mill on the parish record

When the 1856 Griffith's Valuation catalogued commercial activity across Ballynahaglish Civil Parish, Corroy was the only place with a corn mill. In a parish spanning more than eleven thousand acres of improved farmland, bog, and river meadow, that was not a small thing. Water-powered mills were the difference between a harvest and a meal — whoever operated this one was central to the agricultural economy of the surrounding townlands for as long as it ran.

The things the parish still holds

Castle-Mac Andrew and the cave at Gortnaderra

Samuel Lewis's 1837 Topographical Dictionary of Ireland records that Ballynahaglish parish — the parish Corroy sits within — contained the remains of an ancient castle called Castle-Mac Andrew, several cromlechs, numerous encampments, and a 'curious cave' at a place called Gortnaderra. None of these sites are in Corroy itself, but they are in the same parish, on the same landscape, and they say something about how long and how densely this corner of north Mayo has been inhabited. The cave at Gortnaderra has never been fully documented.

Getting there.

By car

Ballina to Corroy is about eight kilometres south on the R310, toward Knockmore. Castlebar is roughly 35 kilometres south-east. The road runs through quiet drumlin farmland with the River Moy drainage to the east and Lough Conn territory opening up to the south.

By bus

Bus Éireann serves the Ballina–Castlebar corridor but rural stops along the R310 are limited. Ballina town is the practical base for public transport.