Mionlach · Co. Galway
A quiet northeast Galway village in old O'Mannion country, with a ruined clan castle behind the grotto and a War of Independence story in its stones.
Menlough sits in northeast County Galway, roughly 35 kilometres from Galway city, 27 from Tuam and 20 from Athenry, in flat inland farming country well off the tourist trail. It is a small village and a half-parish within the larger parish of Killascobe, in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Tuam. This is the Menlough near Mountbellew - not to be confused with Menlo, the Mionlach village on the edge of Galway city, which is a different place with a confusingly similar name.
This was O'Mannion country for centuries. The clan held the land here, and you can still find the ruin of one of their castles in the fields behind the village grotto. A second O'Mannion castle in the parish, Garbally Castle, has more to see of it. By the 17th century the Ffrench family, one of the 14 Tribes of Galway, were the local landlords, and it was on Ffrench land that the mid-19th-century Catholic church of St Mary's was built. The church anchors the village still.
Beside the church stands a building that carries the harder 20th-century history. It was a Royal Irish Constabulary barracks, damaged by fire in 1922 during the War of Independence, and later served as a Garda station before becoming a private house. In the 1980s the village put up a monument to the Menlough battalion of the old IRA. For a small place, the past is close to the surface here.
There is no tourist infrastructure to speak of - no heritage centre, no visitor trail. What Menlough has is a parish, a church, two national schools, a GAA club that plays in the Galway football championship, and a long memory. Come if you have roots here, or if you want to see ordinary inland Galway getting on with its life.