The musical bridge
Bellacorick has a bridge you can play. Each stone along the top of the northern parapet is cut to a slightly different length, so if you roll a round, fist-sized stone along the coping as you walk beside it, the slabs ring out one after another in a rough scale. You can also tap them in quick succession with a pebble, snatching your hand back after each strike to let the note carry. It is the one thing to stop for here, and it takes five minutes.
The bridge went up around 1820, built by the engineer William Bald with his assistant Patrick Knight of the Board of Works while the pair were surveying Erris and laying out its roads. Four elliptical arches carry it over the Owenmore River, each set about 30 feet apart, and the parapet runs close to 400 feet – roughly 120 metres. An inscription credits the Grand Jury and the foreman, the Right Hon. Denis Browne. Contemporary accounts called it the finest bridge in Mayo.
Then the folklore. The 17th-century Erris prophet Brian Rua Ó Cearbháin is said to have foretold that the bridge would never be finished, and that whoever completed it would die. So a piece of the parapet was left out, and it has stayed out ever since – the bridge is deliberately, permanently unfinished.
From peat to wind, and back to bog
Two hundred metres from the bridge, the flat bog once held one of the biggest employers in Erris. After a local campaign led by James Kilroy TD in 1949, a peat-fired power station was built out on the peatland. It ran for 42 years, closing in 2005, and in all that time – so the local history goes – its 40-megawatt plant never once came off-load. Peat was cut from the surrounding bogs, dried, and hauled to the station on narrow-gauge railway; something like 450,000 tonnes of milled peat came off those bogs in a year.
For decades the cooling tower was the tallest structure in County Mayo, a 292-foot landmark visible for miles across the flat ground. It came down on 14 October 2007, watched by a crowd of more than 3,000 – a good turnout for the demolition of a thing most of them had grumbled about for years.
The bog’s next act was wind. In 1992 Bellacorick became the site of Ireland’s first commercial wind farm, its 21 turbines a fixed point on the skyline for a generation. Those turbines are gone now: the farm was decommissioned and the last of them dismantled in January 2026, clearing the ground for a much larger replacement whose blades will reach up to 200 metres at the tip.
Around the bog
Bellacorick – Béal Átha Chomhraic – means ‘ford mouth of the confluence’, and the townland sits in open blanket bog roughly halfway between Crossmolina, about 15 minutes east, and Belmullet, about 25 minutes west, with the N59 running through. Long before the power station, in the spring of 1920, volunteers from Crossmolina captured and burned the RIC barracks here during the War of Independence. Today it is protected peatland, flat and exposed, threaded by old Bord na Móna bog roads that make for quiet walking if you want to stretch the visit beyond the bridge. There is no waymarked loop worth promising you and no interpretive trail – it is bog, and you walk it at your own pace and in your own boots.
Getting there and practical tips
- Facilities: none. No café, shop or toilet on site; the nearest services are in Crossmolina or Bangor Erris. There are a couple of picnic benches by the bridge.
- Parking: roadside near the bridge, off the N59. Spaces are limited and there is no car park proper.
- Care on the road: the bridge sits right on the N59 and you cross to reach the parapet. Mind the traffic, especially with children.
- Footwear and weather: the ground off the road is soft blanket bog that waterlogs after rain, so waterproof boots if you plan to walk it. It is exposed and often windy – bring a layer.
Pick up a smooth, fist-sized stone before you get out of the car; the good rolling stones near the bridge get picked over, and without one you can’t play the thing you came to hear.