If you stop in Ballinrobe for one thing, make it the church. St Mary’s Catholic Church holds nine stained-glass windows by Harry Clarke, the finest Irish stained-glass artist of the 20th century, and there’s no charge – you walk in and look up. (There are two St Mary’s in town; the other, the former Church of Ireland, is now the library.) For a small Mayo market town, that’s a remarkable thing to have on the main street.
Ballinrobe – Baile an Róba, ‘town of the Robe’ – sits on the River Robe two kilometres above Lough Mask, and it’s one of the oldest towns in County Mayo, with origins back to at least 1390. A 1337 entry in the registry of the Dominican friary of Athenry already mentions the monastery de Roba, an Augustinian friary whose restored ruins still stand on the north side of town. A royal patent of 6 December 1606 gave the town its fairs and markets, and Monday has been market day ever since, with streets once given over to particular trades – turf on Abbey Street, poultry on Glebe Street, calves on Bridge Street.
A medal-of-honour man and a crashed plane
Two stories give the town more than its size suggests. In Cornmarket stands a bronze statue of John King, born just outside Ballinrobe in 1862, who went to sea in the US Navy and won the Congressional Medal of Honor not once but twice; the seven-foot figure, by Rick Lewis, was unveiled in 2010. And in 1935 the Lithuanian pilot Feliksas Vaitkus, attempting to fly the Atlantic in a single-engine plane called Lituanica II, came down in a field near the town – a long way from Kaunas to end up in south Mayo.
A free, downloadable heritage walk links thirty sites around the town if you want to follow the history on foot. For deeper roots, the South Mayo Family Research Centre, in the refurbished Schoolhouse on Main Street, holds over a million records – parish registers, civil records and gravestone inscriptions going back to the 1740s.
Lough Mask and the fishing
The water is the other reason to be here. Ballinrobe sits in what Mayo bills as Ireland’s Lake District, between Lough Mask, Lough Carra and (further south) Lough Corrib, and Mask is one of the great wild brown-trout lakes in the country. Each August bank holiday weekend the lake hosts the World Cup wet-fly angling championship, which draws well over 600 competitors – fished from boats in all weathers, and won as often as not by a local. Outside the championship, guides and boat hire operate around the shore.
Closer to town, the Bowers Walk follows the River Robe on a level, paved riverside path that suits families and anyone using a wheelchair. Southwest of Ballinrobe, look out for Cairn Daithi, a 22-foot pile of stones thought to cover a passage grave – one of several prehistoric sites scattered through the surrounding fields.
The races and the golf
Ballinrobe Racecourse is the only one in Mayo and among the most scenic in the country, with ten fixtures from April to September; it was voted Racecourse of the Year in 2012. Entry is around €15 with free parking, and the draw, as regulars will tell you, is how close you get to the horses and jockeys. Race meetings have been recorded in the area since 1773, and the present course is close to a century old.
Just outside town on the Cloonacastle estate, Ballinrobe Golf Club is an 18-hole championship course designed by Eddie Hackett and opened in 1995, threaded with man-made lakes, mature trees and old stone walls. Padraig Harrington called it ‘the finest championship golf course in the West of Ireland’. There’s a driving range and pro shop, and it’s open from 9am to dusk.
Getting there
Ballinrobe is on the N84, the main Galway-to-Castlebar road, with the R331 over to Claremorris. Bus Éireann runs three times a day between Galway and Ballina, stopping here; the nearest airports are Knock (about 22 miles) and Galway (about 30). There’s free on-street parking in the centre and larger car parks at the racecourse and golf club.
If your timing is flexible, come on a Monday for market day, or over the August bank holiday for the wet-fly championship – the town fills with anglers and the lake does the rest.