Omey Island

Omey Island, a tidal island near Claddaghduff on the western edge of Connemara in County Galway, is almost invisible from the mainland until a wide, arrow-marked sandy strand emerges at low tide, allowing visitors to drive or walk across; at high water the crossing floods deep enough to submerge a car entirely.

History

The island’s Irish name, Iomaí, meaning “resting place,” derives from Iomaidh Feichín, “Feichín’s bed or seat,” honouring the 6th-century saint traditionally credited with founding a monastery and settlement there.

Archaeological excavations led by University College Dublin in the early-to-mid-1990s uncovered one of the very few known burials of a woman within an early medieval monastic burial ground anywhere in Ireland, part of a site believed to date from the early 6th century. St Feichin’s holy well still stands near the island’s western edge, close to the ruins of a later medieval parish church that lay buried under centuries of drifting sand until 1981, when the local parish priest and volunteers dug the site free by hand.

Omey’s more recent history has been shaped by successive waves of Anglo-Norman and colonial settlement, from the O’Tooles of Leinster in the early 1500s to the Browns and D’Arcys following the Cromwellian settlements, and later the Martins of Ballynahinch; the Church of Ireland bishop John MacNeice, notable for his opposition to the Ulster Covenant, was born and raised on the island. Victorian travel writers described Omey in stark terms, noting its thin covering of vegetation and sandy soil so exposed to Atlantic winds that, as one 19th-century visitor recorded a local islander explaining, “if ye break the shkin of ‘um… the wind blows the sand away and leaves your pitaties bare” — a vivid account of the precarious farming life once carried on across this small, wind-battered tidal island.