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CURRACLOE

CO. WEXFORD · IE

Curracloe
Currach Cló, Co. Wexford

The Ireland's Ancient East
STOP 04 / 06

Currach Cló · Co. Wexford

Spielberg's Omaha Beach. Tóibín's Brooklyn. The same long stretch of yellow sand.

Curracloe is a crossroads village eight kilometres northeast of Wexford town, and the village isn't really the point. The point is the strand. Seven kilometres of flat yellow sand running north from the access ramp at Ballyvaloo, edged the whole way by dunes, with the Raven Nature Reserve at the southern end and the open sea on the other side. There is a shop, a couple of pubs, two hotels, and a beach. Most people are here for the beach.

If the place looks familiar before you've ever been, that's because you've seen it. Steven Spielberg shot the opening twenty-seven minutes of Saving Private Ryan on Ballinesker Beach in the summer of 1997 - the D-Day landing, all of it, on a kilometre of Curracloe sand. Eleven weeks of preparation, $12 million, 1,500 extras, breakwaters and explosives the French authorities wouldn't allow on the actual Omaha. The shooting itself took fifteen days. The crew put the beach back exactly as they found it. Eighteen years later John Crowley brought Saoirse Ronan and Domhnall Gleeson down for the beach scenes in Brooklyn, and the same dunes did a quieter, sunnier job.

The dunes are doing more work than they look. They have been forming here since the 1600s, sand blown ashore and trapped by marram grass, building up the spit that closes off Wexford Harbour to the south. In the 1950s the state planted Corsican pine on a long stretch of them to stop the sand moving and lost a beach to a forest in the process. The result is the Raven: 1,455 acres of pine and dune and saltmarsh, a National Nature Reserve since 1980, and the winter roost for about a third of the world's Greenland white-fronted geese.

Don't come for a town. Come for an empty Tuesday on the strand, a walk into the Raven, a pint in Furlongs after, and the strange small thrill of standing on the bit of sand where Captain Miller hit the water.

Population

Small village; coastal townland

Walk score

Village in five minutes; the strand keeps going for seven kilometres

Founded

R742/R743 crossroads village; dunes forming since the 1600s

Coords

52.3833° N, 6.3667° W

01 / 09

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 strand

Seven kilometres of unbroken sand.

Curracloe Strand runs north from the village toward Ballinesker and on into the Raven. Blue Flag in 2025. Flat enough to drive on, wide enough to lose people on, backed by dunes the whole way.

Walks & outings → 02 The film set

D-Day was shot here in summer 1997.

Spielberg picked Ballinesker Beach for the opening of Saving Private Ryan because the French wouldn't let him blow up Omaha. 1,500 extras, eleven weeks, a kilometre of Wexford sand standing in for Normandy.

Stories & lore → 03 The Raven

A planted forest on a moving dune.

South of the strand, Corsican pines were planted on the dunes in the 1950s to hold the sand down. The dunes are still moving. Greenland white-fronted geese roost on the sandbar at the southern tip every winter.

Walks & outings →

02 / 09

The pubs.

None of these are themed Irish pubs, because they don't need to be. A few that earn the trip:

Furlongs Bar and Lounge

Local, year-round

Family-run village pub since 1959

Jimmie Furlong took it over in 1959; his son Pat runs it now. Pints, food, a fire, and the village's main answer to the question of where to go after the beach. Open when the strand is empty as well as when it's full.

Byrne's Tavern

Traditional, sociable

Country pub

Other end of the village. The other proper local. Quieter than Furlongs on a busy Saturday, which is sometimes the point.

The Tavern (Hotel Curracloe)

Mixed, sport-on

Hotel bar

The bar at Hotel Curracloe. Pool table, sports on the screen, beer garden if the wind is in the right place. Live music some nights in summer. Open to non-residents.

The Dunes Bar (Ravenport Resort)

Newer, smarter

Resort bar

Inside Ravenport Resort, ten minutes' drive from the village proper. Opened with the hotel in summer 2024. The smart-pint option if you want one - most nights the village pubs are still the village pubs.

03 / 09

Where to eat.

Place	Type	€	Local note
Blake Restaurant (Hotel Curracloe)	Hotel restaurant & carvery	€€	The dining room at Hotel Curracloe. Carvery at lunch, à la carte in the evening, the kind of menu that does a roast and a fish dish well and doesn't try to do anything clever. Useful when the village pubs are full.
Willow Restaurant (Ravenport Resort)	Hotel restaurant	€€€	The proper sit-down option in the area. Inside the new Ravenport Resort. Dinner-only some days; book ahead in summer. The fanciest plate within ten minutes of the strand.
The Winning Post	Beach shop & hot food	€	On the beach itself, by the main car park. Originally a small beach shop opened in 1946 and now a sprawl of ice-cream counter, hot food, surf school and an arcade. Not a restaurant. It is the place you eat chips on the wall in your togs.
Furlongs kitchen	Pub food	€€	Pub food at Furlongs. Chowder, fish, a roast on Sunday. The thing to eat after a wet walk in the Raven when you don't want a hotel dining room.

04 / 09

Where to sleep.

Place	Type	Local note
Hotel Curracloe	Village hotel, 29 rooms	The long-running village hotel. Twenty-nine ensuite rooms, the Blake restaurant and carvery, the Tavern bar, a function room. A two-minute walk from Curracloe Strand. The straightforward beach-holiday option.
Ravenport Resort	Four-star resort, opened 2024	Phase one opened summer 2024 with around fifty bedrooms and suites, a 15-metre pool, the Lír Spa, the Willow Restaurant and the Dunes Bar. Run by Neville Hotels. Nearer to Killinick than to Curracloe village proper, but it markets itself on the strand and hosted the 2025 Blue Flag awards.
A self-catering near Ballyvaloo	Self-catering	Plenty of houses and chalets rent by the week in summer. Drive five minutes inland or up the coast toward Ballinesker and the prices ease. A car helps; the village shop is small.
Camping at the Trading Post	Camping & caravan park	A camping and caravan park near the strand. Useful if you want to wake up two minutes from the sand and you brought your own roof. Summer-season operation; phone ahead.

05 / 09

Stories & lore.

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

Twenty-seven minutes on Ballinesker

Saving Private Ryan

Spielberg started filming on 27 June 1997 and stayed for two months. The French wouldn't permit breakwaters, vintage vehicles or live explosives on the real Omaha; Curracloe gave him a kilometre of beach with the right gradient and a county council that would. The build took eleven weeks, the principal photography just fifteen days, and the weather delivered twenty-one usable shooting days out of twenty-three - a strike rate that would have been impossible in Normandy. About 1,500 people, mostly Irish Defence Forces reservists, ran up the sand in American helmets. Tonnes of explosives, thousands of gallons of fake blood. When it was over the production restored the beach to the metre. The film opened in 1998. The locals still know which dune is which.

Eilis and Jim on the same strand

Brooklyn

Eighteen years later John Crowley brought a smaller crew down to film the beach scenes in Brooklyn - the John Crowley adaptation of Colm Tóibín's novel, with Saoirse Ronan as Eilis and Domhnall Gleeson as Jim Farrell. Tóibín is from Enniscorthy, half an hour up the road. The beach in the film is meant to be in Wexford. So it actually is. The picnic in the dunes was filmed here in 2014; the film came out in 2015 and Ronan got an Oscar nomination for it. Now there are two films in the visitor information leaflet and the strand has done two completely different jobs without changing a thing.

A forest planted to stop a beach

The Raven

By the 1950s the dunes south of Curracloe were moving fast enough to threaten farmland inland. The state's solution was to plant trees on them - mainly Corsican pine, plus Scots pine and a few others - to bind the sand. It worked, more or less, and produced a forest where there hadn't been one. The whole peninsula was declared a National Nature Reserve in 1980. About 35% of the world's population of Greenland white-fronted geese winter on the Wexford Slobs and roost each evening on the sandbar at the southern tip of the Raven. They share the spot with seals, otters, and a long list of dune plants the rest of the country has mostly lost.

How Curracloe ended up on the map

The lighthouse that wasn't

Before Saving Private Ryan, Curracloe was known to people in Wexford for the strand and not much else. Older locals will tell you the village's quieter claim to fame is having missed out on a lighthouse - the original plan to mark the entrance to Wexford Harbour put one here, but the spit of dunes shifted, the channel shifted with it, and the lights ended up on Tuskar Rock and the Black Castle further south instead. Curracloe got the dunes and the geese and the rolling sand and let the shipping go elsewhere. By the standards of the Wexford coast that's been a quiet bit of luck.

06 / 09

Things to do outside.

Wear waterproofs. Bring a sandwich. Tell someone where you're going if it's the mountain.

Curracloe Strand The big one. Walk north from the village access ramp and the sand keeps going past Ballinesker and on toward the Raven. Flat, no scrambling, no fence between you and the sea. Do an hour out, an hour back; nobody finishes the whole strand on the first go.

7 km one waydistance

2 hours one waytime

Ballinesker Beach The Saving Private Ryan stretch, about 1.5 km north of the main Curracloe car park. Same yellow sand. Less crowded than Curracloe proper because the parking is smaller and the access road is awkward. There is a small interpretive sign. The dune behind it is the dune you've seen in the film.

2 km sectiondistance

40 mintime

Raven Point Loop Park at the Raven car park south of the village, walk through the pine forest on the marked trail, out onto the open beach at Raven Point, and back along the inner edge of the dunes. Quiet, flat, sheltered when the wind is up on the strand. Geese in winter, terns and gulls the rest of the year.

8 km loopdistance

2.5 hourstime

Ballyvaloo and the dunes From the village down to the Ballyvaloo access and back through the dune paths. A good short loop if the strand wind is too much and you want to see the dune system from the inside. Marram grass, rabbit holes, the occasional fox.

3 kmdistance

1 hourtime

07 / 09

When to go.

There is no bad time. There are different times.

Spring

Mar-May

The strand mostly to yourself. Migrant terns arriving on the Raven. Cold water, long light, very few coaches. The geese leave for Greenland in April and the place quietens for a month or two.

◉ Go

Summer

Jun-Aug

The village quintuples. The car park fills by ten on a sunny Saturday. Worth it for warm sand and long evenings, but go early or go midweek. Book the hotels months ahead in July and August.

◐ Mind yourself

Autumn

Sep-Oct

September is the sweet spot - water still holding the summer heat, school crowds gone, the strand back to size. The geese start arriving from Greenland in October and the Raven is suddenly the loudest thing for miles.

◉ Go

Winter

Nov-Feb

The strand in a January blow is genuinely something - wide, raw, half a county of sand and nothing on it. Half the food options shut. Furlongs and Hotel Curracloe stay open. Plan accordingly and bring gloves you don't mind losing.

◐ Mind yourself

08 / 09

What to skip.

Honestly? Don't bother.

If a local was sitting beside you, this is the bit where they'd lean in.

Driving down for a couple of hours in mid-July

By eleven the main car park is full and the access road becomes a slow crawl. Either come at eight in the morning or stay overnight. A two-hour mid-afternoon visit on a sunny Saturday is somebody else's bad day.

The Saving Private Ryan tour bus from Dublin

There is no curated film set to look at - the production restored the beach the day they wrapped. The film location is the strand, exactly as it always is. You can do the same pilgrimage on your own with a printout and a picnic, and you'll have it longer.

Treating Curracloe and Hotel Ravenport as the same thing

Ravenport Resort is a brand-new hotel that markets itself on the strand and is several minutes' drive away near Killinick. It's a fine hotel. It is not in Curracloe village, and the village pubs are still the village pubs. Pick the one you actually want.

Swimming on a falling tide without checking the flags

The strand is wide and inviting and the rip currents at certain states of tide are real. Lifeguards in summer, none in winter. If the red flag is up, the red flag is up.

Getting there.

By car

Wexford town to Curracloe is a 15-minute drive northeast - out on the R741, then the R742. Dublin to Curracloe is about 2h 15m via the M11/N11 to Wexford and out from there.

By bus

Wexford Bus and Local Link run services from Wexford town to Curracloe, daily in summer, more limited the rest of the year. From Dublin take Bus Éireann to Wexford and connect locally.

By train

No train. Wexford O'Hanrahan station on the Dublin Connolly-Rosslare Europort line is the nearest, then a 15-minute taxi or local bus.

By air

Dublin Airport (DUB) is the obvious one - about two hours by car. Cork is 2h 30m. Rosslare Europort is 25 minutes south and useful if you arrived by ferry.