Overview
Two firsts in the history of long-distance communication happened on this one stretch of Connemara bog. Guglielmo Marconi built the world’s first permanent trans-Atlantic radio station here, and a decade later Alcock and Brown ended the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by nose-diving into the peat a short walk away. A free, signposted 5 km loop now links both, opened as a Discovery Point in September 2016 and marked as a Signature Discovery Point on the Wild Atlantic Way.
If you only have time for one thing, walk the full loop rather than photographing the memorial from the car park and driving on. The Marconi foundations are the more interesting half of the site and the half most people skip. The name itself fits the ground: Derrigimlagh comes from the Irish, dearg (red) and imleach (marshy shore-land), which is more or less what you’re standing on.
Marconi’s trans-Atlantic station
In 1907 Marconi chose this flat, windswept bog to house the world’s first permanent trans-Atlantic radio station, and from here sent the first scheduled wireless messages across the ocean to its sister station at Glace Bay in Nova Scotia, Canada. The complex was substantial – a condenser house, power plant, workshops and staff housing – and at its peak it employed several hundred people, an extraordinary thing to find on a Connemara bog.
It was burned to the ground during the Irish War of Independence. Today only concrete foundations and scattered remnants survive, with interpretive panels along the route to help you read the scale of what stood here.
Alcock & Brown’s landing
On 15 June 1919 the British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Whitten-Brown completed the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber. After roughly 16 hours over the ocean they sighted the Connemara coast and put down on what they took for a flat green field. It was bog. The soft peat grabbed the wheels, the plane nosed over and broke up, and both men climbed out unhurt to worldwide fame.
The crash site is marked by a white memorial shaped like an aeroplane wing – not a stone cairn, as it’s sometimes described – set out on the peatland with the Twelve Bens behind it on a clear day. The exact spot is also covered on the Alcock & Brown Crash Site page. In 2005 the pilots Mark Rebholz and Steve Fossett re-enacted the flight in a replica Vimy.
Walking the bog
The loop is gentle and mostly flat, and takes most people between 1.5 and 2 hours at an easy pace. It mixes compacted gravel paths with raised boardwalks that protect the peat. You can also hire a bike in Clifden and ride out across the bog; the single Bog Road and the car-park make that straightforward. Because the trail is open around the clock, locals tend to come in the late afternoon for the light off the pools, or early for the bog under Atlantic mist.
The bog itself
Derrigimlagh is a textbook lowland Atlantic blanket bog, the wet ground carpeted in heather, cross-leaved heath and deep mats of sphagnum moss that give it those russet and dark-green tones. In summer the cotton grass comes through. The pools and wetter sections draw the waders that favour open bog – snipe and curlew among them – so it’s worth a slow eye as well as a fast walk.
Practical information
- Hours: open 24 hours a day, year round
- Admission: free
- Parking: car-park at the trailhead, the only place to leave a vehicle
- Facilities: weather-proof information shelters along the trail; no café, toilets or drinking water on site
- Accessibility: fine on foot and on a mountain bike, but the boardwalk steps, uneven gravel and boggy ground rule it out for wheelchairs and pushchairs
- Getting there: from Clifden, follow the R341 (Ballyconneely Road) south for about 4.3 km; the trailhead and car-park are on the left, just after three bridges
- Nearby: Connemara National Park, Sky Road, Kylemore Abbey and Dog’s Bay
The site is run by the Connemara Chamber of Commerce with Fáilte Ireland and Galway County Council, and a Derrigimlagh-to-Kylemore Greenway linking the bog to the abbey has been through public consultation. Bring boots with grip – the boardwalks turn slick in the wet – and a rain jacket whatever the forecast says.