Introduction

Assumed to have been built during the late 15th or early 16th century, Lynch’s Castle is a significant piece of Galway city which seems to be missing from many maps of the time. The structure would have been built by the Lynch family before their influence decreased under Cromwell and now remains as the only non-religious building of the period which still stands today in Galwayi,ii. This short article will discuss the castle’s initial size and construction, the owners of the castle dating back to 1859, and the castle’s preservation since then.

The Two Stages of Construction

Broadly mentioned above, the castle is strangely missing from many of the maps of the time. Some believe that it was constructed during the 1400s or 1500s, with neither the Barnaby Gooch map nor the Speed map of 1583 and 1610 respectively displaying the castle. Despite this, its presence on the 1651 map would suggest that the castle was not initially a towering presence over the city but instead, was more like a grand, perhaps two-storey house of the timeiii. While significant in size by the point of this map being made, its absence from those prior ones is suggestive that the building had increased in size over the years, being a shorter and less significant landmark of Galway before then.

Much of the information on the castle on its dates is speculative. In an article published in 1935, archaeologist John Hynes, suggested that the castle may have been constructed under James Lynch Fitz Stephen (the 1493 mayor of Galwayiv). Additionally, he also mentions that some slabs of the castle are clearly not original to the structure. This does add to the idea that there was a period of either rebuilding or further constructionv.

Owners from 1859 to Present

Having been given access to read the title deeds, archaeologist John Hynes established that between 1859 and 1935, multiple changes in ownership to the property have been made. The premises was owned in 1859 by George Stainforth and some others. By 1880, Mary Hall and others became owners of the property. Skipping forward to 1918, the premises would then be rented out by Nellie Burke née Kirwan to the Munster and Leinster Bank before selling the area along with the French Property (some of the surrounding area) to the bank in 1920vi.

Preservation Efforts

Through an article on the history of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, it is known that Matilda Redington, Honorary Secretary of the GAHS wrote a letter to the owners of Lynch’s Castle highlighting the poor state of the house around 1903 or 1904. Along with this, the GAHS would continue push for preservation efforts around Galway by this time and played a role in the eventual acquisition of the property by Munster and Leinster Bankvii. During this time, the two shops in the House would be removed in place of the bank’s office, and the property would eventually go under the name AIB following an amalgamation of Munster and Leinster Bank with two other banks in 1966viii,ix. There seems to be some consensus among local historians such as O’Dowd and Kenny that efforts to maintain the premises by the bank have been successful throughout their time as owners of the locationx,xi.


Endnotes

1 Dick Byrne, Derek Biddulph, and Peadar O’Dowd, Galway on the Bay (Donaghadee, Co. Down: Cottage Publications, 2002), 40.
2 Peadar O’Dowd, Old and New Galway (The Connacht Tribune Ltd., 1985), 47.
3 Byrne, Biddulph, and O’Dowd, Galway on the Bay, 40.
4 Albert Matthews, ‘The Term Lynch Law’, Modern Philology 2, no. 2 (1904): 173–95.
5 John Hynes, ‘Lynch’s Castle Galway’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 16, no. 3/4 (1935): 144–54.
6 Hynes.
7 Joe O’Halloran, ‘“By Time Everything Is Revealed”: The Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 1900-1999’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 53 (2001): 162–82.
8 Tom Kenny, ‘Lynch’s Castle’, Galway Advertiser, 17 August 2023, https://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/137138/lynchs-castle.
9 ‘Company History | AIB Investor Relations’, AIB, accessed 15 November 2024, https://aib.ie.
10 O’Dowd, Old and New Galway, 47.
11 Kenny, ‘Lynch’s Castle’.


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