Slievemore: the deserted village beneath an Irish mountain

Slievemore is the largest deserted village in Ireland: a long line of stone cottages running along the lower slopes of a mountain on Achill Island, on the Atlantic coast of County Mayo. The village was lived in for centuries, emptied by famine and emigration, and has been a ruin for generations. It is one of the most evocative places in the whole country.

A village on the mountain’s side

Slievemore takes its name from the mountain above it — Sliabh Mór, ‘big mountain’, the second-highest peak on Achill Island. The village below it is a ribbon of stone cottages, perhaps a hundred of them, built of the local stone and roofed with turf or thatch. Some are simple single-room dwellings; others are larger, with two rooms and a byre.

People lived here for a very long time. The site has been occupied since at least the medieval period, and probably earlier, and the village was a real, working community, farming the poor land and fishing the Atlantic. It was a hard life, on the edge of the country and the edge of Europe.

Famine and emigration

The Great Famine of the 1840s hit Achill hard, as it hit the whole west of Ireland. People died, and those who could left. Emigration to Britain, America and beyond drained the island of its young people, and the village of Slievemore, on its exposed hillside, was gradually abandoned. By the late nineteenth century many of the cottages were empty.

The village did not die all at once. Some of the cottages were used seasonally for years afterwards, as ‘booley’ dwellings where families moved up to the mountain with their cattle in summer, a tradition that lasted into the twentieth century. But the permanent community was gone, and the houses were left to fall.

A village being studied

Today Slievemore is cared for as an archaeological site. The Achill Archaeological Field School was founded in 1991, and its Deserted Village Project has excavated and recorded the cottages, learning about the people who lived in them and how they farmed and built. The ruins are open to visitors, who walk the line of cottages beneath the mountain.

Slievemore is a quieter kind of abandonment than the industrial ghost towns elsewhere in this archive. It is rural, ancient and slow — a village emptied by hunger and hope, on an island at the edge of the Atlantic. It belongs beside Tyneham in England and Barmaz in Italy as a place where a whole way of life simply came to an end.

Frequently asked questions

Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Tyneham: the village Britain gave up for a war — United Kingdom
• Goussainville-Vieux-Pays: the village under the flight path — France
• Barmaz: the Alpine hamlet that emptied in a single winter — Italy