Inver

The Erris, Mullet Peninsula
STOP 02 / 02

Inver · Co. Mayo

A handful of houses on the approach to the Mullet, where the road runs out.

Inver is not a village in the sense of somewhere you stop. It is a coastal settlement on the road south toward Belmullet and the Mullet Peninsula, a gathering of houses on high land above the Atlantic, and the end of most people"s journey inland from Erris.

The name appears on few maps. The post office that once kept the place on the records is long shut. What remains is the landscape — bog and rock and the sea a few kilometres off, the light high and clear in ways that make ordinary things look like they have been lit for a film shoot. The road past goes to Belmullet. Everything else is either the sea or the land behind it.

There are no pubs, no shops, no cafés. There is only the fact of the place itself — a settlement that has held on, in small numbers, in a country that tries to empty itself. The walk from the road down to the shore, if there is a path, is whatever path time has made.

Population

c. 50

Coords

54.2833° N, 10.0833° W

01 / 02

Stories & lore.

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

A peninsula that ran out of reasons to stay

Erris, the end of the world

The Erris peninsula and the Mullet have held people for centuries — fishing families, farming families, people for whom the edge of the land was the whole world. The population has spent two hundred years leaving. Inver is one of the names left on the stone walls and the place names, a settlement that once mattered enough to mark on a map, now a handful of houses and a question about how land holds memory when people leave.

Getting there.

By car

Belmullet to Inver is 20 km north on the coast road via Bangor Erris. Westport to Belmullet is 60 km via Castlebar and the N59. There is no public transport past Bangor Erris.

Next on the tour

Co. Mayo

Belmullet

The main settlement on the Mullet, 20 km south. Harbour, fishing, a few pubs, and a sense that the road has arrived somewhere that matters.

Co. Mayo

Bangor Erris

The nearest service village, 10 km south. School, shop, post office, the small bones of a settlement that held on.

Co. Mayo

Westport

Sixty kilometres south. A planned Georgian town, a harbor, and a very different size of place.