Clanricarde tower house, reroofed 1947
The castle that got its roof back
Oranmore Castle is a rectangular four-storey tower house from around the 15th century, with walls three metres thick, a battlemented parapet, machicolations and gunloops - a textbook late-medieval Clanricarde stronghold on the shore of Galway Bay. Sir Edward Fitton, the English president of Connacht, attacked it in 1574 and failed to take it; it was besieged again in 1641 during the Confederate wars. The Athy family abandoned it around 1853 and it stood roofless for nearly a century. In 1947 the writer Anita Leslie bought it for two hundred pounds, called in the county engineer for a new roof, and made it habitable. She and her husband, Commander Bill King - a wartime submarine captain who later sailed solo around the world - added a wing in the 1950s and lived there. It passed to her daughter Leonie, wife of the De Dannan musician Alec Finn. The castle is privately owned and not reliably open to the public, but it is visible from the shore and the coast road. It is the rare Irish tower house that never became a ruin.
St Mary's, 1803
The church that became the library
The old parish church, St Mary's, was completed in 1803, deconsecrated in 1972, and now houses the public library - a tidy second life for a building that would otherwise have gone the way of the medieval church ruins nearby, which date to roughly the 13th century. The Church of the Immaculate Conception took over as the Catholic parish church. The Presentation Sisters established a convent in the town in 1861. None of this is grand, but it is the layered ordinary history of a real working parish, not a heritage set-piece.
1,126 people in 1996, 5,819 in 2022
A town that quintupled
The census tells the story plainly. Oranmore had 1,126 residents in 1996 and 1,446 in 2002. Then the motorway and the Celtic Tiger arrived together: 3,513 by 2006 in a wave of housing, 4,325 in 2011, 4,990 in 2016, and 5,819 by 2022. It is one of the fastest-growing towns in the west, and it shows - new estates, a busy interchange, schools at capacity. The local hurlers, Oranmore-Maree, won the All-Ireland Intermediate Club Hurling Championship in 2019. The actress Nicola Coughlan and the rugby international Bundee Aki both have Oranmore connections. This is where people live, not where they come on holiday, and the entry should be read that way.