Take an atlas and drag a finger to the far northwest of Ireland. Beyond Donegal’s serrated coast, beyond the mainland’s last hedgerows and farm walls, a narrow scrawl of rock rises from the Atlantic.
This is Tory Island (Toraigh/Tory), five kilometers long and scarcely a kilometer wide, where winter seas bully the piers and gulls write their alphabets on the wind.
Population: roughly 150 souls, give or take a good summer and a hard winter. One road, one church, one shop that doubles as a post office, one lighthouse shouldering the weather, a modest hotel and hostel, a social club, and—against every expectation of the modern world—one king.
Not a hereditary monarch with jeweled scepter, but an elected figurehead chosen by islanders to welcome strangers, carry their stories ashore, and speak for a community that has learned stubbornness from the sea. For more than two decades that role belonged to Patsy Dan Rodgers—musician, painter, neighbor, and the man widely hailed as the last king of Ireland.
This is not the tale of a fairy-tale court. It is the story of an island that kept faith with itself, and of a king whose reign was measured not in decrees but in handshakes, tunes, brushstrokes, and the quiet courage to say: We are still here.
Explore kindred island stories for depth and context:
• Rotten Island, Ireland: A Speck of Madness in the Atlantic
• Great Island Cork: A Wild, Wounded, and Wonderful Heart of Ireland
• Inch Island: A Wild Whisper of Donegal, a Fever Dream of Ireland
• Tory Island: Ireland’s Last Outpost of Madness, Majesty, and Memory
A kingdom by consent
Tory’s kingship is as old as the island’s oldest stories, and in some versions its roots tangle with the sixth-century arrival of St. Columba (Colm Cille).
The legend goes that the saint, stepping ashore to preach a new faith to a pagan outpost, met a man called Duggan. The islanders feared pirates who prowled the coast, burning and stealing.
Columba, so the tale tells, named Duggan king and prophesied that if he stood up to the raiders the island would endure.
The pirates were beaten back, the islanders embraced Christianity, and a monastery was raised in remembrance. Centuries later, its bell tower—lean, watchful—still punctuates the skyline.
This origin myth has another thread beloved on Tory: a pot of “holy clay” gifted by Columba to the Duggan family, clay said to ward off rats and keep fishermen safe at sea.
Older islanders will still tell you the clay works—if handled, as tradition insists, by the eldest Duggan. The details shift with the teller, but the point stands: on Tory, ceremony belongs to the people. A king is crowned not by conquest, but by community.
The island as classroom: wind, stone, endurance
Most guidebooks list Tory’s dimensions; few describe its weight.
The east end is all drama and edge: path thinning to a land-bridge, cliffs riven by the Atlantic, the air working on your bones like salt on rope.
Farther west the profile softens, storms having sanded the island’s knuckles down through the centuries. In winter, the whole place feels like a held breath. Windows rattle on clear nights. In bad ones, the sea climbs the walls.
Old stories of weather are not exaggerations on Tory. There was the year a stray plastic tank, wrested from its moorings by a rogue wave, thumped a window in the dark like a fist from the sea.
There was 1974, when gales and swell locked the island away for nearly two months—seven weeks and three days by local reckoning.
Shops rationed stocks; neighbors parceled out sugar, tea, flour. The state proposed relocation. Some families accepted houses on the mainland. Many did not.
That winter hardened the island’s sense of itself. It also shaped the next king.
The making of Patsy Dan Rodgers
Patsaí Dan Mag Ruaidhrí—known to the world as Patsy Dan Rodgers—was born in 1944 on Westland Row in Dublin. As a small child he was adopted and brought to Tory, the island that would become both his family and his vocation.
He grew up between West Town and East Town, absorbing the rhythms of fishing tides and ceilí nights, mastering the button accordion that later became his signature.
Locals remember the cap—a black seafarer’s cap pulled down over a sparkle of defiance in his eyes—and the way he shifted between English and Irish with the ease of a fiddler changing tunes.
Then, in the mid-20th century, a visitor altered the trajectory of Tory’s art. The English painter Derek Hill arrived in 1956, and with a teacher’s patience he coaxed islanders to paint as they saw—untrained, unvarnished, true. From that encounter bloomed a school of “primitive” or “naïve” painting utterly unique to Tory: bold colors, stern horizons, boats shouldering seas, cottages clinging to slopes, saints ghosting across headlands. Patsy Dan took to paint like a gull to thermals.
His canvases toured galleries in Ireland and abroad; his island became both subject and muse.
Art was one thread; advocacy another. During the 1970s and 1980s, when government plans urged depopulation and resettlement, Patsy Dan became a tireless opponent of abandonment. He argued in parish halls and official rooms that an island is not a problem to be solved but a culture to be sustained. That stubborn love would become the defining chord of his reign.
An elected crown: from Padraig Óg to Patsy Dan
Tory’s kingship is passed not by bloodline but by consent. In the 1990s, after the death of Padraig Óg Rodgers, the children of the late king and the wider community turned to Patsy Dan.
Somewhere between a vote and a blessing, the island made its choice. The man with the accordion and paint-stained hands became the island’s representative—King of Tory in name, neighbor in practice.
His job description was elastic. He greeted the ferry on arrival and saw it off at day’s end, offering a warm word in Irish or English to every guest who stepped onto the pier.
He traveled to the mainland and abroad when asked, serving as island ambassador without expense account or motorcade. H
e fought quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, for more frequent sailings and safer harbors, noting that similar islands had two ferries and higher capacity while Tory too often felt forgotten.
He wanted visitors to find rooms, music, meals, and handcrafted work that sent them home carrying the island’s spirit—and he said so.
Not all days were gentle. Those close to him say the weather lived in his temperament: he could be squall and sunshine in the same afternoon.
If you bore the brunt of a gale you might later be surprised by the tender calm that followed. Leadership on a rock in the Atlantic is not ceremonial. It is personal.
In 1997, the University of Ulster presented him with an honorary master’s degree, a formal nod to a life spent carrying culture from cliff to city and back again.
In May 2016, Charles III (then Prince of Wales) expressed a wish to visit Tory and meet the king on a future trip; the visit never materialized, but it was a small acknowledgment that even at the rim of Britain and Ireland, a community still crowned its own.
Dún Bhaloir: where myth keeps watch
If the kingship anchors Tory’s present, myth knots its past. The island’s east end culminates in Dún Bhaloir—Balor’s fort—a promontory walled on three sides by sheer drops of up to 90 meters, fronted on the landward side by a sequence of banks that look like the ribs of a sleeping giant.
Archaeologists date the fort’s origins to the Iron Age, perhaps around 700 BC, though human presence on the island stretches back to roughly 2500 BC.
In legend, Balor of the Evil Eye, chieftain of the Fomorians, made his seat here. From Tor Mór, the island’s highest point, he is said to have imprisoned his daughter Eithne, fearing a prophecy that his grandson would one day kill him. The prophecy had a name—Lugh—and the story, like so many Irish stories, ends with fate unfolding despite every effort to bind it.
Walk to Balor’s fort and the island reshapes your steps into reverence. A narrow track gives way to a natural land-bridge, the path lifting under your feet as if the rock itself were breathing.
There’s no interpretive plaque telling you where to stand; there is only exposure, wind shouldering your back, and the long white sentences of waves exploding on the north face.
On storm days, the cliffs fling spray high enough to salt your lips at the fence. Caution is not a suggestion here. It is a law of survival.
Now turn west and the island gentles. Bushes crouch low to dodge the wind. The sky looks wider, the light less chastising. People who love Tory love both faces: the east’s stern grandeur and the west’s unassuming grace.
Winter terms, summer grace
If you ask islanders to name the year that tested them most, many will choose 1974. With the sea in a fury and the winds in league, the Tory Island ferry could not run for weeks. Stocks dwindled.
The radio carried rumors of resettlement plans. Officials pressed cases in tidy phrases. Families weighed history against hunger, and some, after much talk and more tears, accepted keys to houses on the mainland. Others stayed.
When Patsy Dan spoke of that winter in later years, he did so without self-pity.
He would tell you the number of days, then tell you how neighbors kept one another going—how a place with three shops could still find a way to share.
He mourned what was lost—“very, very sad,” he said of the departures—but he also insisted on what endured. In that balance you hear the philosophy of an island monarch: praise your people, honor their grief, demand better infrastructure, and make room for the stubbornness that got you through.
Tourism helped after the storms. Summer ferries brought musicians and hikers, painters and families. The island’s hotel, hostel, and B&Bs found their seasons.
The shop stacked shelves with the usual goods and the quietly precious ones—fresh bread, stamps, batteries, gossip. And every morning and evening the king put on his cap and walked to the pier.
The art of welcome
Ask any traveler about their first impression of Tory and most will describe a greeting. Sometimes it was a handshake and the clatter of a tune from the accordion. Sometimes it was a story about the weather, the crossing, the saint, or the fort. Sometimes it was just a nod that said: You’re here now; that’s the important part.
Those welcomes were not small gestures. On an island, every arrival shifts the day’s chemistry. A group of schoolchildren means laughter along the quay. A couple with rucksacks means advice about footpaths and cliffs. A painter means talk in the evening about color and cloud. The king managed that chemistry one hello at a time.
He also defended the basics that make welcome possible. He lobbied for better ferry capacity, noting that comparable islands had more sailings and larger boats. He dreamed—not in palace terms but in community terms—of doubling visitor numbers so local craftspeople could sell more, the pub could host more sessions, and each guest could find a good bed and a good meal without asking three times. He did not call for a theme park. He called for fairness.
Life and death in West Town
In later years, Patsy Dan lived in West Town, painting when the weather threw tantrums and performing when it smiled. He wore the island’s Irish with pride, switching to English for visitors who needed it. He welcomed dignitaries with the same warmth he offered backpackers. And when illness called him across the water, he went.
On 19 October 2018, he died in Dublin’s Mater Hospital, aged seventy-four. The news traveled the way news travels in such places: like weather, arriving in gusts.
His remains came home by air. The funeral filled the island with the memorabilia of gratitude: stories, tunes, brushstrokes, tears. Dignitaries crossed from neighboring counties and from farther afield, but the most important mourners were the ones who had walked the road with him—fellow artists, musicians, fishers, schoolchildren, friends.
He left behind his wife Caitlín, children Breda, Majella, Christina, and Seán, and grandchildren who inherit not only his name but his insistence that an island is alive if its people say it is.
Since his passing, the throne has been vacant. Some say the vacancy itself is a kind of crown: a reminder that the authority on Tory rises first from the ground up, that community precedes ceremony.
A king’s contradictions: gale and calm
Stories of Patsy Dan often begin with the cap and the accordion and the canvases, but the man was more than his emblems.
He could bristle. He could blaze. If he felt an injustice—about ferries, funding, services—he spoke with hurricane plainness. If a visitor needed a storyteller or a child needed a tune, he was gentle as a south wind. That doubleness—gale and calm—is not a flaw on Tory. It is a climate.
People sometimes asked if he liked being treated as a fixer of all things island. He would shrug off the notion with a half-smile and a weary truth: I’ll do what I can, but don’t put me on a pedestal. The kingship, he would say, matters because it binds the island together, not because it elevates a single man.
Why the legends matter
It is tempting to tuck Balor and Lugh and Columba into a “mythology” chapter and treat them as museum pieces. Tory refuses that shelving. Dún Bhaloir keeps watch over actual fishermen. The Tau Cross has outlived prayers and will outlive more. The bell tower from the monastery reminds islanders that faith, like stone, endures scouring if you mend it.
And there is a practical wisdom coded into the legends. The Duggan story is not just about magic clay; it is about custodianship—a community choosing someone to hold something precious for the common good. The kingship is not just a romantic pageant; it is a living technology for welcome and advocacy. In an age that often treats small places as logistical headaches, Tory’s old stories insist that culture is an infrastructure too.
The ferry as artery
To the mainland the Tory Island ferry is a service. To islanders it is an artery. Its schedules define school weeks and clinic visits, gig nights and supply runs. Prices and capacity are not abstractions; they calibrate the pace of life. When sailings are frequent and reliable, the island breathes easier. When weather or funding cuts the line, the chest tightens.
Patsy Dan’s recurrent plea—“We seem to be lost along the road, and that’s not fair at all”—was not a complaint for its own sake. It was the sound of a small place asking the state to remember its perimeter.
A note on numbers and children
Statistics on Tory are living things. One year there might be twenty-one children, eight of them born in the previous four years; another year the names shift as families come and go. What matters is the arc: as long as there are schoolbooks in the morning and music at night, as long as someone is painting the sea and someone is mending a net, the island continues its sentence.
That is why the Tory Island school matters, and why a king took such care to greet every ferry: each visitor is a potential ally, each child a vote of confidence in tomorrow.
The artist’s bequest
Search for Patsy Dan’s paintings and you’ll find seas rendered not as postcard blue but as muscle—green-gray, white-shouldered, full of work. Boats push into their weight with a stoicism that reads like prayer.
Cottages sit tight under heavy skies. The palette is not naïve but necessary; to paint the Atlantic gently would be to lie.
Those canvases traveled farther than the king ever did.
They hung in galleries where the air smelled of varnish instead of salt, and people who had never boarded a ferry stood in front of them feeling, for a moment, the strange urgency of a place that refuses to be smoothed into a brochure.
After the crown
What becomes of a crown when no one wears it? On Tory, the answer is modest: the work continues. The ferry still tethers the island to the world. The shop opens its door with the same bell.
The pub tunes its Friday night to whoever walks in with a fiddle. Artists set out canvases when weather mandates indoor days.
Guides bring visitors to Balor’s Fort and remind them to watch their footing on the cliff edge. Parents shepherd children to school. The bell tower marks time.
There is talk, sometimes, of whether the island will crown another king. The conversation turns on the same values that raised Patsy Dan: service, welcome, courage, patience. The vacancy is not a crisis. It is a pause in an old sentence, a comma where history takes a breath.
Practical notes for pilgrims (because every legend meets a timetable)
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Getting there: Boats sail from the Donegal coast (season and weather dependent). Check current Tory Island ferry schedules and Tory Island ferry prices before traveling, and allow slack for Atlantic moods.
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On the island: The shop/post office carries essentials. There is a church, a social club/pub, accommodation (hotel/hostel/B&Bs), and miles of walking. Cars do not travel over on passenger services; your feet are the best transport anyway.
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Walking to Dún Bhaloir: Follow the road east through East Town until it yields to track and then to the land-bridge. Wind can be severe; keep to paths and give cliff edges the respect they demand.
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Seasons: Summer is generous. Winter is honest. Both are beautiful if you pack the right attitude (and layers).
For a deeper cultural frame across Ireland’s islands and harbors, dip into these companion pieces that echo the same chords of myth, endurance, and sea:
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