The history of Headford
Cairns and forts, the friary, the St Georges, Lewis's neat town of 1837, the lace. 7 moments, in order.
- Prehistory to the Iron Age
Cairns and stone forts
The country around the town holds burial cairns, Iron Age stone enclosures, early Norman and later castles and several monastic sites.
- 14th or 15th century
Ross Errilly
The friary two kilometres north-west, one of the best-preserved monastic ruins of its period in Ireland, appeared for a moment in John Ford's The Quiet Man in 1952. Killursa, a ruined medieval church of St Fursey, lies 2.6 km to the west.
- 1775 to 1901
The St Georges
The St George family owned the town through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a history told in Gerardine Candon's Headford, County Galway, 1775-1901. R. J. Mansergh St George built Headford Castle, a handsome modern house in its day, on the ruins of the old one, with a demesne entered from the town by a good gateway.
- 1837
Samuel Lewis's town
The Topographical Dictionary of 1837 counted 1,441 people and 217 houses in a neat, clean town much improved by its owner, with a constabulary station, petty sessions on Mondays, a dispensary, a Tuesday market and fairs on 11 May and 14 October. Bobbin lace, coarse linen and flannel were made here.
- 1859 and 1865
Two St Mary's
Father Peter Conway built the church at Claran in 1859 and the church in Headford in 1865, on land given by the St Georges; both are dedicated to St Mary.
- 2000s
The lace returns
Headford's Torchon lace tradition, recorded in the national inventory of intangible heritage, is reproduced by modern lacemakers; the Lace Matrix, a sculpture of iron and lace, stood for it, and Tarmo Thorström's Cyclogenesis renewed it in 2024.
- 2019
A school of 780
Presentation College Headford had about 780 pupils in late 2019, in a town of 1,235 people at the 2022 census.
Where this comes from
Every paragraph above summarises a statement in Wikipedia, "Headford", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, as it read on 2026-09-19. Follow it for the footnotes. Nothing has been added from memory.