The history of Laurencetown
Oghilmore, the castle of 1585, the village of 1700, the arch of 1782, Lewis's fairs, the estate's end. 5 moments, in order.
- About 1585
Ballymore Castle
John Lawrence, of the family from Ashton Hall outside Lancaster active in the English administration of Connacht, gained wide lands in the barony of Longford by marrying into the O'Maddens and built the castle. The place had been Oghilmore, for the ruined castle of O'Hill.
- About 1700 and 1750
The village
Founded and named Laurencetown, then expanded fifty years later. The family turned Protestant between 1729 and 1749, and Walter Laurence, with his mother's fortune drawn partly from Montserrat, built the mansion of Belview in its parkland.
- 16 April 1782
The Volunteer Arch
Colonel Walter Lawrence raised the monument with its Latin inscription on liberty won by the armed sons of Hibernia after a long servitude. The Prince of Wales visited Belview in the 1780s, and the castle was refurbished in 1815.
- 1837
Lewis's village
A police district centre with petty sessions on Thursdays, carpentry and joinery, fairs on 8 May, 22 August and 15 December, an octagonal market house on arches that carts drove through to be weighed, a Catholic church and a Methodist chapel and school.
- 1840s to 1920s
The estate goes
After the Famine 4,300 acres went through the Encumbered Estates court; debt and family quarrels left no Laurence in residence by about 1908, the art was sold in 1912, and the last sale came in the 1920s.
Where this comes from
Every paragraph above summarises a statement in Wikipedia, "Lawrencetown, County Galway", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, as it read on 2026-09-19. Follow it for the footnotes. Nothing has been added from memory.