Bellacorick
Bellacorick or Bellacoric (Irish: Béal Átha Chomhraic, meaning "ford mouth of the confluence") is a townland in County Mayo, Ireland. It comprises an area of 800 acres (3.2 km2). The area is remote, virtually uninhabited blanket bog which was once used mainly for milled peat production. Nowadays, it is a Special Area of Conservation because of the unique nature of the intact blanket bog habitat. The main Belmullet to Castlebar and Ballina road passes through this townland.
There is virtually no arable land in this area of lowland blanket bog but in the 19th century the area was leased to a Patrick Burke who housed horses in stables opposite the public house which comprises virtually all of this hamlet. There was a shooting lodge which later became the post office, but this was later moved again to Kilsallagh and there is now no post office in Bellacorick. There used to be a Garda Station close to the Bridge but it was abandoned around 1940 and the area was policed by Crossmolina.
In about 1820, the civil engineer, William Bald, who was mapping the area and building roads through Erris, designed the Bellacorick Bridge, known as the Musical Bridge, it can be 'played' in two different ways:
The bridge was difficult to erect. Because of the remarkable soundness of the earth the foundation had to be secured by timber. It has four elliptical arches each thirty feet apart, with battlements nearly 400 feet (120 m) long. The Erris prophet Brian Rua U'Cearbhain referred to the then unbuilt bridge at Bellacorick in the 17th century. He said that it would never be finished and it never has been.
Peat has been Ireland's staple fuel for centuries and still provides about 12% of the nation's energy needs. In June 1949, James Kilroy TD, representing Erris, requested the government to build a 'turf fired power station for the generation of electricity in Erris. He also pointed out the advantage of reclaiming the bog and introducing a scheme of afforestation!. The ESB acquired five and a half acres, two hundred metres from the bridge as the site for the power station. The access road was built over the ruins of the old shooting lodge. At the same time Bord na Mona bought 20,000 acres (81 km2) of bogland. They harvested the turf to feed the power station. The peat was pulverised and dried in the summer. It was stored on the bog in large polythene covered piles. It was then taken to the station by railway wagons pulled by diesel locomotives.
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