Overview
On 20 October 1960 the last 23 residents of Inishark packed what they could carry, left it at the shore and were taken off for good. No one has lived on the island since. It sits about a kilometre southwest of the larger, inhabited Inishbofin, off the Connemara coast of County Galway, a low island of slate and shale rising to just under 100 m. The Irish name is Inis Airc, and even its meaning is unsettled, read variously as ‘island of the piglet’ or after a personal name, Earc.
What’s left is a village given back to the weather: roofless stone cottages, a ruined schoolhouse and the shell of a 19th-century church, threaded through with much older field walls. Since 2008, archaeologists from the University of Notre Dame have been excavating here, mapping Bronze-Age farming systems, early-medieval monastic sites and the post-medieval village layer on top of them.
Why it emptied
At its 1881 peak the island held over 200 people, living on fishing, a few fields and the seasonal kelp trade. There was no sheltered harbour, no electricity and no doctor, and a run of winter storms could cut the community off for weeks. That isolation is what killed it. On Easter Sunday 1949, three young men drowned rowing to Inishbofin for mass; not long after, a teenager died of appendicitis when the weather stopped any rescue.
By 1960 only 23 people were left. The government refused to fund the pier the island needed and offered mainland houses instead, and the evacuation followed that October. The TG4 documentary Inis Airc, Bás Oileáin (2007), directed by Kieran Concannon, tells it through the survivors and footage of the day they left.
What you’ll find on the ground
The lack of any modern building is the point: the ruins and the field patterns sit almost exactly as they were left.
- St Leo’s church and graveyard – The roofless 19th-century church and its graveyard mark the centre of the old village, near the cliff edge and worn hard by the wind off the Atlantic.
- The abandoned village – A run of roofless cottages, the schoolhouse and outbuildings along the island’s high road. Many of the dry-stone walls are still standing square.
- Early-medieval monastic remains – Inishark’s patron, Leo of Inis Airc, is linked to a monastic settlement here between the 6th and 8th centuries; a holy well and stone shrines survive from that era.
- The Bronze-Age landscape – Low stone field walls and hut circles run across the western slopes, the oldest human marks on the island.
- The Bothy Gallery – Artist Luke Franklin built this small, unlocked gallery near the old schoolhouse in 2013, part of a wider bothies project. Four white walls, a visitor book and rotating work. It’s free, always open, and you’re asked to sign in.
Wildlife
The cliffs carry fulmars, shags and razorbills, and winter storms sometimes push grey seals onto the western shore. Sheep are still ferried over some summers to graze the island’s pastures, the last working thread of the way of life that left in 1960.
Getting there
This is the hard part, and the honest caveat: there is no regular ferry to Inishark. The scheduled Cleggan boat serves Inishbofin, not Inishark. To land, you charter a boat, usually from Inishbofin (Aidan Day, 086 832 4123) or from Cleggan. The island has no pier, so the landing depends on tide, swell and a crew who know the rocks; in the wrong conditions it doesn’t happen at all.
There’s nothing on the island: no shop, no toilet, no shelter. Bring water, food, boots and windproof layers, check the marine forecast before you commit, and keep to the worn paths, as the cliff edges have no railings and the ground is uneven throughout. A guided walk out of Inishbofin or Cleggan is worth it for a first visit, both for the boat handling and for the oral history that goes with the ruins.
If you can only pick a day, aim for late spring or early autumn, when charters run more reliably and the light is clearest across to Bofin.