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Clifden, County Galway

Things to do in Clifden

The Station House, the Sky Road, Clifden Castle, Derrygimlagh bog, the Marconi site and the pony show.

Plan of Clifden with the main sights labelled

The sights as pins on the model; tap one for its page and directions.

9 things to see

  1. Station House Museum
    01

    The Station House

    Hulk Street · 194 m east of Market Square

    Clifden's railway station from 1895 to 1935, now a hotel, shops, flats and a museum of the line and the town.

  2. Clifden Castle
    02

    Clifden Castle

    2.4 km west of Market Square

    John D'Arcy's house of about 1818, the seat of the man who drew the town, a ruin above Clifden Bay on the Sky Road.

  3. 03

    The Sky Road

    5.2 km west of Market Square

    An eleven-kilometre loop along Clifden Bay and Streamstown Bay, climbing more than 150 metres, with the Atlantic, the castle, the coastguard station, Inishturk, Turbot and the town below.

  4. 04

    Derrygimlagh bog

    4.7 km south of Market Square

    Blanket bog six kilometres south of the town, where Alcock and Brown came down in 1919 and where the Marconi station sent the first wireless words to America in 1907.

  5. 05

    The Marconi station

    4.7 km south of Market Square

    The site of the first high-power transatlantic wireless station, opened in 1907, burned in 1922.

  6. 06

    Thomas Whelan's monument

    Sky Road · 297 m west of Market Square

    The memorial to the Clifden man hanged in Mountjoy in 1921, one of the Forgotten Ten, commemorated in the town every year.

  7. Christ Church
    07

    Christ Church

    Church Hill · 240 m west of Market Square

    The Church of Ireland church of 1853, on the site of the 1810 one.

  8. 08

    Monument Hill

    795 m west of Market Square

    The D'Arcy monument on the hill west of the town, with the whole triangle of streets and the bay laid out beneath it.

  9. 09

    The quay

    Nimmo's quay of 1831, through which marble, corn, fish and kelp once left, at the foot of the town.

Things to do

The Connemara Pony Show

Held on the third Thursday of August since 1924 and in Clifden since 1947, the society's show is the town's great day.

Arts Week

Late September: poetry, lectures, recitals and traditional music, begun by the community school's teachers in 1979.

Connemara National Park and the Twelve Bens

The mountains and the park are the countryside the town serves; Inishbofin and Slyne Head lighthouse lie off the coast.

Football and rugby

Naomh Feichín won the Galway junior football championship in 2022; the Connemara Blacks draw rugby players from the whole region.

The pubs

Thirteen of them, the article counts, in a town of 1,259 people, along with three supermarkets and the library that keeps the local history collection.

Castles, abbeys and old churches nearby

  1. 194 m
  2. 297 m
  3. 626 m
  4. Monument Hill
    Monuments
    795 m
  5. 2.4 km
  6. 2.5 km
  7. 4.7 km
  8. 4.7 km
  9. 7.3 km
  10. 9.7 km
Ringforts and sites4Holy wells5Castles1Beaches3Abbeys1Viewpoints3

Parks, beaches, lakes and views

  1. 1.1 km
  2. 1.2 km
  3. 1.2 km
  4. 1.3 km
  5. 1.5 km
  6. 1.5 km
  7. 1.5 km
  8. 1.9 km
  9. 2.3 km
  10. 2.4 km

Sport and leisure

  1. 115 m
  2. 248 m
  3. Renew
    Sports centres
    254 m
  4. 266 m
  5. Clifden GAA
    Sports centres
    514 m
  6. 600 m
  7. 882 m
  8. Sports Centre
    Sports centres
    1.2 km

Photographs: Newbert12, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Drow69, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons; Newbert12, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The descriptions summarise Wikipedia, "Clifden" (CC BY-SA 4.0, read 2026-09-19); positions and the lists are OpenStreetMap. Opening times and admission are not on record here; check before a visit.