Colin Breen challenges the image of Ireland’s western seaboard as an isolated Gaelic world, revealing a medieval maritime society connected by trade, politics, religion and warfare across Ireland, Scotland and continental Europe.
The development of the Wild Atlantic Way has been a success on many levels. As a marketing campaign, it has brought significant global attention to the beautiful and dramatic landscapes of Ireland’s western seaboard, while also providing social and economic opportunities for the communities who live across the region.
For the modern visitor, this is a remote place and a landscape filled with stories of a romantic past linked to writers, painters and pirate queens.
Creating an Idealised Gaelic West
This romanticised perception of the west was promoted by the early architects of the independent Irish state. Politicians and poets encouraged a vision of these places as Gaelic idylls, with the coasts and islands representing the last vestiges of an insular and culturally vibrant past.
Pádraig Pearse’s construction of a stone cottage in the wilds of Connemara has come to exemplify this creation of an idealised past, a place he regarded as steeped in ancient Gaelic culture and language.
In a similar sense, the writers and their stories from the Blasket Islands were presented to generations of young students as representing some form of deep-time survival of a past Ireland that was increasingly being diluted by modernity.
However, more detailed historical scrutiny strongly challenges such perceptions. Rather than being isolated, the western seaboard was intrinsically connected to the wider western European social world.
Life for the communities who lived along these coasts was often brutally hard, where daily existence was dictated by harsh and ever-changing weather and sea conditions.
Even the physical appearance of the land would have been different. Swathes of woodland would have covered the now-barren rocky landscape of the west with which we have become so familiar, and the land was largely unenclosed.
It was only in later centuries, with the introduction of sheep farming and the clearance of people from parts of the west, that the artificially wild landscape appeared.
Lords, Castles and Maritime Power
During the Middle Ages, from the 11th to the 17th centuries, a series of independent political lordships developed along the western coastlines of Ireland and Scotland.
Stretching from west Cork in the southwest to the north coast of Antrim and across the North Channel to the coasts of Argyll and the Hebrides, kin-groups such as the O’Sullivans, O’Malleys, O’Donnells, MacDonalds and MacLeods controlled the land and seaways beyond the reach of the Crown-controlled territories to the east.
Many of the castles and fortified tower houses of the Gaelic elite survive, while the ruins of churches and monasteries represent the foundations of the religious elite.
Women had a degree of agency in these societies and held positions of authority. Many of the Franciscan abbeys founded during the 15th and 16th centuries came about through their patronage.
Individual women also held political power and, while there is a significant level of myth around figures such as Grace O’Malley, her standing in this society was not unique.
We know much less about the so-called ordinary people who are not listed in the historical records. Yet it was these people who worked the land and fished the coastal waters.
Life was marked by a daily struggle to survive and continual toil. Their diet was limited to forms of broth, with bread and milk, and they lived in what could best be described as shelters.
Recent commentary around a united or unified Ireland represents an increased dynamic around this subject, but it is important to note that there never was a united Gaelic political nation in the past.
The Gaelic maritime society present during the Middle Ages was instead a loose cultural federation of familial groupings. While they shared cultural traditions, a common language and other characteristics, the sept or clan groups retained autonomous territories and were not part of a single, bounded nation.
Their identities were shaped by elements of a shared past, but were also dynamic and continually subject to change.
Connected to the European Atlantic
Neither were these isolated or peripheral groupings. The Gaelic social elite were bound to wider western European society through religion, trade and learning.
Pilgrimage to sites across Europe was a common practice and ensured connectivity with wider European political and cultural developments.
These lordships also continually engaged in alliances through marriage or fosterage with kin-groups in adjacent territories or as far north as Barra or Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.
Not all attempts at alliance-building or cultural diplomacy were successful, and one of the features of these communities was the near-continuous level of violent conflict between them.
The Hebridean island groups, in particular, had developed renowned military expertise, and large groups of these hired northern fighters were a common feature of the political fabric of the Irish lordships.
Trade and communication were also central features of these communities. Throughout the Middle Ages, large fishing fleets from France and Spain were regular annual visitors to these coastlines, and the associated financial and social interactions ensured Gaelic society was embedded in the wider social world of the European Atlantic seaboard.
The Irish maritime lordships had varying levels of naval capacity, with some groups such as the O’Driscolls and O’Malleys developing specialist seagoing skills. But the majority of Gaelic lords built some of their wealth on the taxation and seasonal supply of the visiting fleets.
By the close of the 16th century, this maritime society was under serious threat from the combined colonial projects of the English and Scottish crowns, which would later unify under James I.
The lordships had largely collapsed by the middle of the 17th century, and the deep linguistic and cultural connections across the western coasts of Ireland and Scotland gradually diverged.
Ultimately, there was a degree of interdependence between the Gaelic regions of Ireland, Scotland and the Western Isles, but this was never a Gaelic state.
Instead, the peoples who lived along the western seaboard were part of a culturally dynamic society firmly embedded within the wider western European social world of the time.
Colin Breen is Deputy Head of the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at Ulster University in Northern Ireland and an advisor to UNESCO on culture, heritage and climate adaptation. His most recent book, Lords of the Sea: An Archaeology of the Medieval Gaelic Maritime World, was published by Cork University Press in 2026.
