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) and a six-storey market house. The Grand Bridge followed in 1859 at a cost of £1,000.
Outside the town, the historic burial ground at Killeroran contains church ruins and a round tower built in 1867. It is a working burial ground, so use the cemetery entrance and give people visiting graves space. 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 is on the Suck Valley Way, and Sport Ireland lists the village as the start and finish of the route, which follows the River Suck. Check the route notices and follow the signed road diversion between Mount Mary and Creggs while works continue. Leave dogs at home and stay on the waymarks.
The village also lies on the Hymany Way and the Beara–Breifne Way, the national trail that traces O’Sullivan Beare’s 1603 march from west Cork to Leitrim. Check each route’s own notices before you set out.
The village today
Ballygar is a working village rather than a tourist stop, and the reason to pull in is the trails, the Killeroran burial ground or a break on the Galway–Roscommon drive. Its public library has a reference and local-studies collection that can help with tracing local families, so check its opening before you go.
Ballygar lies in flat east Galway near the Roscommon border, about 19 km from Roscommon town.