BY KATIE SULLIVAN
On the morning of June 15, 1919, people working at the Marconi wireless station near Clifden in Connemara saw an extraordinary sight. A large biplane came down out of the mist and landed nose-first in the nearby bog. Out climbed two exhausted airmen, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, who had just made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
The two British aviators had taken off from St John’s in Newfoundland the day before in a modified Vickers Vimy bomber, hoping to win a prize offered by the Daily Mail for the first non-stop transatlantic crossing. Their journey lasted around sixteen hours and was a battle the whole way, through thick fog, ice, cold, and engine trouble, with Brown at times climbing out onto the wings to clear ice from the engines.
When they spotted the Irish coast, they thought the flat, green bog looked like a perfect field to land on, but the wheels sank into the soft ground, and the plane tipped forward. Luckily, neither man was seriously hurt. The site they landed near was already famous, as Guglielmo Marconi had built one of the first transatlantic wireless stations there, which sent messages across the ocean from 1907.
Today a white monument shaped as an aircraft tail fin stands on a hill overlooking Derrygimlagh bog, and a looped walking trail leads through the landing site and the remains of the Marconi station.
It is a remarkable reminder that a quiet corner of Connemara was once at the centre of two great leaps in world communication and travel. Have you ever walked the bog road at Derrygimlagh and stood where Alcock and Brown came down?
The images may be AI generated for the illustration of the story.
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