Galway Bay

The sounds through the islands

Four passages lead into the bay between the mainland and the Aran Islands. The North Sound, Bealach Locha Lurgan, lies between Inishmore and Lettermullen in Connemara; Gregory's Sound between Inishmore and Inishmaan; the Foul Sound between Inishmaan and Inisheer; and the South Sound between Inisheer and County Clare. Inside the bay are many smaller islands, and the rock changes underfoot: granite west of the city, limestone to the south.

A protected shore

The coastal parts of the bay are a Special Area of Conservation for the range of habitats along them: mudflats and sandflats, lagoons, saltmarsh, turloughs, vegetated cliffs, limestone pavement and calcareous grassland. Common seals and otters live here, and the bay is an important site for seabirds, waders and wildfowl. The lagoons are slightly brackish and hold specialist plants, tasselweed and rare stoneworts among them; the turlough at Ballinacourty fills to a lake of about 25 hectares each winter.

Boats, a tragedy and the songs

The bay is the home of the Galway hooker, the black-hulled, red-sailed working boat that carried turf to the islands and now races in the summer regattas. On 4 May 1902 eight fishermen from a village near Kilcolgan were lost when their boat went down in the bay; seven drowned and the eighth, Patrick Walsh, swam ashore and died of exhaustion on the beach, and a fund was raised for the families.

The name is everywhere in music: in the old song The Rare Old Mountain Dew, in John Lennon's The Luck of the Irish, in Arthur Colahan's Galway Bay, in a song Sean Connery sang in Darby O'Gill and the Little People, in Steve Earle's Fort Worth Blues and his Galway Girl, in the Pogues' Fairytale of New York, in Toasted Heretic, the Mahones and the Waterboys' Spring Comes to Spiddal. It is not, whatever the crowd sings, in Ireland's Call.