Dún Briste
Dun Briste
Interesting facts
- The blowhole beside the stack, Poll na Seantainne, is roughly 30 metres deep and connects to the sea through an underground channel.
- The 1980 landing on 30 July put people on the stack for the first time in centuries; the team camped overnight on the summit.
- Among the finds on top were cultivation ridges and a broken quern stone for grinding grain, signs that people once farmed the isolated summit.
- The 1980 landing party included the archaeologist Seamus Caulfield, best known for his work on the Neolithic Céide Fields along the same coast.
- Every year on Garland Sunday, the last Sunday of July, pilgrims gather on Downpatrick Head, where Mass is said beside the old church ruins.
- The present statue of Saint Patrick on the headland dates from the early 1980s and replaced an earlier one put up in 1912.
- A viewing structure called The Crossing, built in 2014 with architecture students from the Catholic University of America, lets visitors circle the blowhole safely.
Why it is worth it
Dún Briste, the "broken fort", is a sea stack standing about 200 metres off the tip of Downpatrick Head on the north coast of County Mayo. It rises some 45 metres from the Atlantic, is about 63 metres long and 23 metres wide, and its flanks show, with textbook clarity, the horizontal bands of the rock it is made of: layers of limestone, sandstone and shale laid down on a sea floor in the Carboniferous period, roughly 350 million years ago. Seen from the clifftop the strata of the stack line up exactly with those of the headland opposite, so the eye can reassemble the missing bridge of rock that once joined them.
That bridge is traditionally said to have failed in a violent storm in 1393, when the people living on the promontory had to be brought across the new chasm on ropes. Local legend tells the story differently: Saint Patrick, having founded a church on the headland, was defied by the pagan chieftain Crom Dubh, and struck the ground with his staff so that the chieftain's fort was split away from the mainland. The ruins of an early church and a statue of the saint still stand on the headland. When researchers were landed on top of the stack by helicopter in 1980, they found the remains of stone buildings and of walls for sheep, confirming that the summit had once been lived on.
The headland around the stack is a small anthology of coastal erosion. Close to the cliff edge the ground opens into Poll na Seantainne, a blowhole where the sea has hollowed out softer layers beneath the turf and surges up through the hole in heavy weather. Nearby, large stones on the grass spell out "EIRE 64", one of the aerial markers laid out during the Second World War to tell pilots they were flying over neutral Ireland, next to a former coast-watching lookout. The top of the headland is open, unfenced grass, and the edges are sheer.
Getting there
Downpatrick Head is about 6 km north of the village of Ballycastle in north County Mayo. The nearest large town is Sligo, about 58 km away, and the nearest airport is Ireland West Airport Knock (NOC), also around 58 km away. A car park lies about ten minutes' walk (roughly 500 m) from the viewpoint facing the stack; the path gets very muddy after rain and the clifftop is unguarded, so keep well back from the edge. The Céide Fields, a Neolithic field system, are a short drive west along the same coast.
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From the encyclopaedia
Dún Briste is a natural sea stack or pilaster – in geomorphology called a stack. It consists of sedimentary strata that was deposited during the Carboniferous period, possibly Mississippian, approximately 350 million years ago.
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