A market town built to a plan
The Kelly estate around Ballygar held some 5,300 people at the 1841 census, on the eve of the Famine; the 2022 census counted 660 in the village. That gap is most of the town’s story in two numbers. Ballygar appears as a townland as far back as 1585, but it only became a town in the 1820s, when the landlord Denis Henry Kelly developed it as a market – building on a market first established in 1818 by Rev. Armstrong Kelly – and laid it out to a plan: a wide main street, a market square, a diamond junction and two back streets. By 1840 the market here was reckoned second only to Athlone’s for the volume of its trade.
Kelly ran the place with some unusually forward ideas for the time. He issued ‘cleanliness tickets’ to tenants and, in 1835, founded a Reproductive Loan Fund, an early ancestor of the credit union. The Irish name, Béal Átha Ghártha, is usually taken to mean ‘the mouth of the ford of the garden’.
After the Famine
Griffith’s Valuation in 1855 recorded 67 houses, a police barracks, a parochial school, a dispensary and a Protestant church. The late 1850s then brought a burst of building: a new parochial school, the Catholic church of St Mary’s (dedicated in 1857), a six-storey market house, and a 28-metre (93-foot) round tower in Killeroran graveyard. The Grand Bridge followed in 1859 at a cost of £1,000. Much later, in 2018, the local Tidy Towns committee added a bandstand to the Market Square, its curved roof and fleur-de-lis detailing matched to the street lights.
Ballygar Castle
There was a castle in the townland of Ballygar by at least 1585, held by Francis Shane. It was garrisoned during the 1641 rebellion and had disappeared from the records by the early 18th century. Little of it survives to see.
Walking
Ballygar sits on three waymarked long-distance routes, which is the main reason walkers pass through:
- Hymany Way – a 90 km route through the east Galway lowlands.
- Suck Valley Way – Stage 8 covers 13 km from Athleague, following the eastern bank of the River Suck into the village.
- Beara–Breifne Way – the national trail that traces O’Sullivan Beare’s 1603 march from west Cork to Leitrim.
Fishing
The River Suck near the village is well regarded for coarse fishing, with bream, perch and pike in the slower reaches, while the faster River Shiven holds wild trout. For roach, Black’s Lake on the Derryhippo River – a 15-acre lake about 2 km from the Suck – fishes well, especially in winter.
The village today
Ballygar is a working village rather than a tourist stop, and the reason to pull in is the trails, the fishing or a break on the Galway–Roscommon drive. The Ballygar Carnival has run every year since 1945, and in 2003 the village hosted the Afghanistan team during the Special Olympics World Summer Games. There is a credit union – a fitting descendant of Kelly’s loan fund – and a public library with a reference and local-studies collection useful for tracing local families.
Ballygar lies in flat east Galway near the Roscommon border, about 19 km from Roscommon town. If you are fishing, save Black’s Lake for a cold, still day in winter, when the roach come on best.