Galway City Walls

Along the way

1. 1

   Spanish Arch

   Start with the one piece of wall you can stand on. Two arches of the 1584 quay extension, with the medieval wall running back from them along the river; the steps up to the wall-walk are beside the Museum. Look up for the corbels and the slots of the machicolation. The 1988 dig here found a sea-gate no map had ever shown, 22 coins, a marble, a stone pencil and a nineteenth-century billiard ball.

2. 2

   Galway City Museum

   Free, and ten minutes well spent before the walk proper. The ground floor holds the 1647 South Bastion plaque — THIS FLANKER AND WOORK WAS BUILT IN THE YEAR OF JOHN BLAK FITZ NICHOLAS ESQUIRS MEARALTY — and the finds from the digs you'll pass later. Upstairs, the windows look down onto the wall-walk.

3. 3

   Hall of the Red Earl

   Druid Lane, behind the glass under the Custom House: the oldest building found in Galway, late thirteenth century, built for Richard de Burgo who founded the walled town. It was already a ruin on the 1650s Pictorial Map. Dug in 1997 and left where it lay — this is how the plan wanted the rest of the walls shown.

4. 4

   Blake's Castle

   At the bottom of Quay Street, the stone tower with the battlements is a fifteenth-century merchant tower house, now a restaurant. One of the "fair and stately buildings … all of hewn stone" an English visitor described in 1614, when he said the whole town looked as if it had been built on one model.

5. 5

   Kirwan's Lane

   The best-kept medieval lane in the city, barely two metres wide between Quay Street and Cross Street. The wall is gone almost everywhere, but the street plan it enclosed is still underfoot: the lanes, the long narrow plots, the kink where Cross Street meets Quay Street.

6. 6

   St Nicholas' Collegiate Church

   Founded in 1320, a generation after the walls were begun, and the largest medieval parish church in Ireland still in use. The three-roof profile came with fifteenth-century extensions, when the town was rebuilt in cut stone after the fire of 1473. Open daily; the carved tombs and the Saturday market outside are both worth the detour.

7. 7

   Lynch Memorial Window

   Market Street, in the wall behind the church. A Gothic window and skull-and-crossbones plaque mark where, by tradition, Mayor James Lynch FitzStephen hanged his own son in 1493 when no one else would. The window is nineteenth-century; the stones it sits in are older.

8. 8

   Lynch's Castle

   Shop Street, late 1400s: the finest town house left in the city and the richest carved stonework — gargoyles, hood-mouldings, the Lynch and Fitzgerald arms. Plaques like these once sat on the towers and gates too, to say who had paid for them. It is a bank; the ground floor is open in banking hours.

9. 9

   Lion's Tower

   Eglinton Street, at the car park entrance. Lion's Tower was the north-east corner of the medieval circuit and was still standing when Fleming drew it in 1890. A carved stone plaque and a bronze marker hold the spot now — the only place on the north side where the wall is pointed out at all.

10. 10

    North Bastion · Eyre Street

    Walk into Dunnes Stores and look left: seven to eight metres of battered seventeenth-century bastion wall, the tallest piece left anywhere in the city, with the wall-walk still showing on the outer face. The arch through it is modern. Excavation in 1995 found the defensive ditch three metres out from the base, eight metres wide and probably water-filled. Shop hours only.

11. 11

    Ball Alley Lane

    A delivery lane off Williamsgate Street, and an honest one. The brick-patched stonework high on the right is the east face of the citadel's middle bastion, built after Cromwell's army took the city in 1652. The Great Gate — the main landward entrance, with a clock tower from 1638 — stood a few metres away at the top of William Street. Nothing marks it.

12. 12

    Eyre Square Centre

    Go in from Eyre Square and down to the lower floor. The longest run of wall left in Galway, with two fourteenth-century towers — Penrice's (D-shaped, nine courses of cut limestone) and New Tower (rough migmatite boulders) — only survived because the Castle Barracks were built on top of them in the 1700s. The parapets are 1990s guesswork; the battered bases are original. From here, Merchants Road back to the Arch follows the line of the southern wall.

Practical