County Galway
Gaillimh
- IrishGaillimh
- ProvinceConnacht
- County townGalway
- Local governmentGalway City Council and Galway County Council
- Area6,149 km²
- Population277,737 (2022)
- Highest pointBenbaun, 729 m
Seventeen shillings and tenpence
The Congested Districts Board was set up in 1891 to deal with the poorest ground in the country. The test was valuation, under thirty shillings a head.
Galway's congested districts came in at seventeen shillings and tenpence a head. That was the lowest of all the eight counties.
Nine years later 75.8 per cent of holdings in Galway were under thirty acres.
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Dún Aonghasa
A stone fort on the edge of a sheer cliff above the Atlantic, the largest of the prehistoric forts on Aran.
Three massive drystone walls. Outside them, from cliff to cliff, a band of thousands of jagged upright stones set to stop anyone coming in.
It is over three thousand years old. Excavation found metalworking, houses and burials. The fort was strengthened again between AD 700 and 800.
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Augusta Gregory
Born Isabella Augusta Persse at Roxborough on the fifteenth of March 1852. In 1880 she married Sir William Gregory of Coole.
From 1896 she and Yeats were close friends. In 1897 a conversation at Duras, in Galway, began the plan for an Irish national theatre. She was secretary of the committee, and between 1904 and 1912 the Abbey staged nineteen of her plays and seven of her translations.
The Coole estate was sold to the Congested Districts Board in 1914 and divided among the tenants. She died at Coole in 1932. The house was demolished in 1941.
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One of the eight congested counties of 1891. Its archbishop, John MacHale of Tuam, was also the man who shut Father Mathew out of the west.