Caisleán Fheartagair - the Burkes' tower house
Feartagar Castle
Two and a bit kilometres east of the village, on a low hill near the River Nanny, stands Feartagar Castle - a five-storey tower house roughly twelve metres by ten at the base, built between the 15th and 17th centuries by the de Burgos. The Burkes, descended from the Anglo-Norman William de Burgh, ruled across Connacht for centuries before being dispossessed in the Cromwellian conquest of 1651; the castle later passed to the Blakes of Tuam, who built a since-vanished house alongside it. Locally it is called Jennings Castle, a name traced from Eoin, anglicised through John to Jennings. It keeps its corner bartizans, a machicolation over the door, a vaulted second floor and two stone stairs. It is a National Monument, reached by a short walk from the road - though it is sometimes locked against vandalism, and you may have to ask at the nearest house.
The Kilconly woman who reformed Holloway
Mary Size of Ratesh
Mary Size was born in 1883 in the townland of Ratesh in Kilconly and went to the local Tubberoe national school, then served as a monitor at Cloghan's Hill, intending to teach. Instead she joined the British prison service, starting her probation at Manchester's Strangeways in 1906. In 1927 she was appointed Deputy Governor of Holloway, the first woman to hold the post and the only woman in an equivalent role in the UK. Over the late 1920s and 1930s she pushed through reforms in England's women's prisons - mirrors and cosmetics allowed in cells, libraries expanded, censorship eased, and the first Catholic chapel at Holloway built in a disused ladder shed. She gifted a large window to the parish church at home in Kilconly. She died in 1959.
Chapel Road, rebuilt 1830
St Conleth's church
The Catholic church on Chapel Road takes its present shape from 1830, when a new building went up at a cost of around fifteen hundred pounds; the parish has long been united with neighbouring Kilbannon. The dedication is to Conleth, and the older form of the placename, Cill Chonnla or Cill Conaola, carries the same sense - a church of a Conla or Conleth. It is a working parish church, plainly built and still in use, with Mary Size's window among its furnishings.
St Benin's monastery, on the road back to Tuam
Kilbannon round tower
About seven kilometres south-east, on the way back toward Tuam at Kilbannon, stand the ruins of an early monastery founded by Benignus - St Benin, a disciple of Patrick said to have died in 467. The badly damaged limestone round tower, dated to the 10th century, still rises some sixteen and a half metres, with a Franciscan church of around 1428 and old crosses and slabs in the graveyard beside it. It is older than the cathedral town of Tuam down the road, and almost nobody stops.