He came here and listened
Synge and the Playboy
J.M. Synge visited Geesala and the surrounding Erris townlands in the early 1900s, travelling with W.B. Yeats and staying in Belmullet. He walked the bog roads, watched girls picking shellfish on Doolough strand, and recorded the speech and manners of the people he met. The play he wrote after — The Playboy of the Western World — is set in a shebeen in this country. Synge was specific: fifteen place names from the Erris area appear in the text. The preface names Geesala directly as a place where the English was 'fully flavoured' with Irish idiom. When the play opened in Dublin in 1907 it caused riots, which Synge said was the audience not understanding what he'd actually written. The hotel in Geesala was named for him until recently.
Ireland's first commercial wind farm, 1992–2026
Bellacorrick
In October 1992, Bord na Móna opened twenty-one wind turbines on the bog at Bellacorrick, a few kilometres east of Geesala. Six-and-a-half megawatts, enough for 4,500 homes — Ireland's first commercial wind farm, built on one of the country's best wind resources. The turbines ran for thirty-three years, outlasting their projected twenty-five-year lifespan. In November 2025, Bord na Móna began decommissioning them. The last turbine came down in January 2026. The site is being cleared to expand Oweninny Wind Farm, already Ireland's largest, which sits adjacent and whose 60 large turbines were producing 192 megawatts before the Bellacorrick expansion was approved. The old 53-metre turbines are gone; 18 turbines at 200 metres are coming. The bog that powered the first Irish wind energy experiment now powers the largest.
Neolithic farming country, buried and partly uncovered
The Erris archaeological landscape
North Mayo's blanket bog conceals one of the most extensive Neolithic field systems in the world. Céide Fields, near Ballycastle to the northeast, is the visitor-facing end of it — 6,000-year-old stone walls preserved under peat, discovered by a local schoolmaster in the 1930s when he noticed stones while cutting turf, and later confirmed archaeologically by his son Seamus Caulfield. The Belderrig valley, between Geesala and Ballycastle, contains its own section of the same landscape, where sea cliffs have cut through the bog sequence and exposed the Neolithic walls in the rock face at the cliff edge. The whole north Mayo coast, from Belderg west toward Erris, was farmed in 3,500 BC by a community that built walls, raised livestock, and grew wheat and barley before the bog grew over everything and preserved it. Geesala sits on the western margin of that landscape.