An Armada wreck off Inver Point, 1588
The Santiago and the bare ship
In the autumn of 1588 the scattered ships of the Spanish Armada came down the west coast of Ireland in ruins, and several foundered off north Mayo. One of them, the Santiago, was driven ashore off Inver Point on Broadhaven Bay, carrying a crew and, by some accounts, an Irish bishop. Broadhaven was a bay the Spanish knew - through that season their ships used it as shelter, exchanging goods for information with the local people. Inver remembers the wreck in folklore as An Long Mhaol, the bare or hornless ship, because she came in stripped of her mainmast, which is said to lie buried in a bog to this day. The survivors here threw in their lot with Don Alonso de Leyva, whose growing host of castaways crossed the Owenmore and seized the Barrett castles before its own end further north. Of all the Armada disasters on this coast, the one off Inver is the one the parish still tells.
Born at Inver, 1648 - he foretold the railway
Brian Rua, the Prophet of Erris
Brian Rua Ua Cearbhain was born at Inver, in the townland of Falrua, around 1648, and is remembered across Erris and Achill as the Prophet of Erris. The sayings attributed to him - the Tarngaireacht Bhriain Ruaidh - included that carriages with iron wheels would one day run north and south, that the stones on the roads would be talking, and that fire carriages on iron wheels would bring death. When the Achill railway opened, the prophecy found its grim echo: in 1894 the first train on the new line carried home the bodies of young Achill harvest workers drowned in Clew Bay, and in 1937 a line closing was reopened to bring back the dead of the Kirkintilloch bothy fire. The original papers of his prophecies were destroyed, by tradition burned by his own son in the heat of one of their quarrels. What survives is the telling, which has outlasted the documents by three centuries.
A 1936 church with Dublin glass
St Patrick's and the Earley window
St Patrick's, the Catholic church at Inver, was completed in 1936 to serve this corner of Kilcommon parish. It is a modest building for a small and scattered population, but it holds one thing worth stopping for: a stained-glass window attributed to Earley Studios of Dublin, the long-running ecclesiastical workshop that glazed churches the length of Ireland through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a townland with no shop and no pub, the window is the one piece of made beauty kept indoors. The cemetery nearby, opened in 1969, holds the more recent generations of a place that has buried far more than it now houses.