We pick up on our next leg of the Wild Atlantic Way – travelling from Skibbereen to Mizen Head in County Cork – after leaving Cape Clear behind us. This leg feels like “home territory” for me as I know the area well – my own family of Collins’ came from outside the village of Ballydehob.

County Tipperary Surnames and Places

When someone signs up for our weekly Letter from Ireland, we ask them for the Irish surnames in their family and the counties in Ireland their ancestor came from originally. As a result, we now have about 25,000 entries on our list. The following names are ones we received from readers whose ancestors came from…

Kinsale to Clonakilty on the Wild Atlantic Way

We start our journey along the Wild Atlantic Way in the lovely town of Kinsale. We are very fortunate to have this on our doorstep as we live about twenty minutes away. Every school child in Ireland knows this place for the Battle of Kinsale which took place in 1601 and made real the English…

Cape Clear on the Wild Atlantic Way

We left the pier in Baltimore (sharing a name and a link with Baltimore city in the USA) at 10.30am and headed off to Cape Clear across a gentle swell. Cape Clear has about 130 people living there permanently – all speaking Irish to varying degrees. That had dropped from a pre-famine population of over…

6 Favourite Online Irish Heritage Resources.

Here are just six of our favourite Irish Heritage resources, with an example of how we can use each one to help one of our readers.