Roundstone
Alexander Nimmo, the Scottish engineer who built harbours and roads all along the west coast, laid out Roundstone in the 1820s, and fishermen from Scotland settled it. The English name is probably a mistake: Cloch na Rón is the seal's rock, not a round stone, though a strikingly round rock does mark the entrance to the bay and Roderick O'Flaherty called it Round-stone Haven in 1684. Painters have been coming since, and the hill of Errisbeg rises 300 metres straight behind the village.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
O'Flahertys, Nimmo and the friars
The country north of the village belonged to the O'Flaherty chiefs, who built a Dominican priory about two miles north in the fifteenth century. After Nimmo's harbour and Catholic Emancipation came a Franciscan monastery in 1835, and by the end of the 1840s the village had a thriving fishery and 400 people. The R341 connects it to the N59.
Painters, a rock star, a regatta
Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats, Gerard Dillon and Nano Reid all painted here, and galleries such as the Stable Gallery and Yvonne King's studio carry on the trade. Sting had a house in Roundstone in the early 1980s and wrote most of the Police's Zenyatta Mondatta in it. The Summerfest and regatta are held in July, with traditional Irish nights weekly through July and August, and the village is twinned with Noyelles-sous-Lens in France. From the summit of Errisbeg, 300 metres, in the Conamara Theas Gaeltacht, the view takes in Roundstone Bog, the Aran Islands to the south and Clifden and the Twelve Bens to the north.
Questions people ask
What does Roundstone mean?
Who founded Roundstone?
How high is Errisbeg?
Written from Wikipedia, "Roundstone, County Galway" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.