Mullaghmore Head
— — the green headland the Atlantic comes to find.
Not only on a wall.
“A small green peninsula at the top of County Sligo, where the Atlantic turns into Donegal Bay. The harbour was designed by Alexander Nimmo in the 1820s and the village still uses it: fishing boats, a row of houses, a hotel above the slip. On a still summer day it reads as a quiet seaside town. In winter, the offshore reef known as Prowlers throws up some of the largest ridable waves in Europe, and surfers travel from across the world for the chance at one. Classiebawn Castle holds the rise above the harbour, the same silhouette since 1874.
Mullaghmore Head, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Mullaghmore is a peninsula and village on the northwest coast of Ireland, in County Sligo in the province of Connacht, about 25 kilometres north of Sligo town. The headland reaches into Donegal Bay, with views east toward the table-topped summit of Benbulben (526 metres) and northwest across open Atlantic water toward the coast of County Donegal. The Mullaghmore Head loop is a designated discovery point on the Wild Atlantic Way, the 2,500-kilometre coastal driving route that runs the length of Ireland's western seaboard from Kinsale in Cork to the Inishowen peninsula in Donegal. The harbour was constructed in the 1820s under the engineer Alexander Nimmo, commissioned by the Palmerston family, who owned the surrounding estate.
The waves that have made Mullaghmore famous form on a reef called Prowlers, roughly a kilometre offshore from the head. Atlantic depressions rolling in from a thousand kilometres of open ocean focus on a shallow underwater ledge, throwing up rideable faces approaching 18 metres during the strongest winter swells. In 2020, the Irish surfer Conor Maguire was towed into a wave at Mullaghmore later estimated at around 18 metres, the largest yet ridden in Ireland. The window for such waves is narrow: late autumn through early spring, when low-pressure systems track south of Iceland and the wind blows offshore from the southeast, holding the face up long enough to surf.
Classiebawn Castle stands on the rise above the harbour, its single tower visible from every approach to the peninsula. Construction began in 1856 under Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston and twice British prime minister, who had inherited the Mullaghmore estate. He died in 1865 before the castle was finished; it was completed in 1874 by his successor. In the twentieth century it became the summer home of Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, who was killed by an IRA bomb placed on his fishing boat in Mullaghmore harbour on 27 August 1979. The castle remains in private hands and is not open to the public, though it can be seen clearly from the head and the coast road.