Over the last few weeks, we have been writing about buildings on Earl’s Island which began life as a Bleach and Flax Mill in the 1850’s. It was then converted into a Jute Factory, became a bonded warehouse, a factory for making cannon shells during World War 1 and was occupied by the 6th Dragoon Guards and the 17th Lancers during the War of Independence. After the British Army left, it was vacant for a while before being converted into a factory known as IMI, or Irish Metal Industries.It was opened by Seán Lemass, Minister for Industry & Commerce on July 22nd, 1935. The site consisted of about 13 acres of which 3 were occupied by buildings.

This Remarkable photograph of Shantalla Village was taken in 1945 by Pádraic Mac Dubháin and is from the National Museum collection. You will sometimes see the place name written as Shantallow and you will hear it pronounced Shantla by people with Galway accents. It is derived from the Irish ‘Sean Talamh’, old ground, though why Shantalla should be older ground than that which surrounds it is a mystery. Maybe it is because some of the land was not being worked. Our photograph shows a cluster of thatched cottages and outhouses on the Rahoon Road, possibly near where the entrance to Highfield Park is today. It was taken from a small hill in the foreground.

Newtownsmith was an important development outside the town wall on the northern side of the city in the late 18th and early 19th century. The project was undertaken by the Governors of the Erasmus Smith Estate. In this suburb, the county courthouse was erected between 1812 and 1815 and a little later in 1824, the town courthouse. In 1823, it was objected that there were several suitable sites for a new courthouse ‘immediately in the town’ and that it was ‘quite idle’ to lay foundations in Newtownsmith, or in any part of the suburb. Galway’s second bridge was completed in 1819 and it connected the courthouses with the new (1810) county and town gaols on Nun’s Island.

William Evans of Eton (1798-1877) was the drawing master of that public school in England and was an accomplished artist who exhibited widely in London, Dublin and Paris. He made a number of visits to the west of Ireland in 1835 and 1838 where he produced a lot of studies and finished watercolours, mostly of Counties Galway and Mayo, a mixture of picturesque landscapes, market and street scenes and what might be called peasant structures and peasant portraits. Some were of Galway City and many of Conamara. One cannot be sure what brought him out to ‘the wilds’ to that very rugged terrain which would have been remote and very adventurous for an English artist at that time. He liked the parts of Ireland least visited and said  that “Ireland failed to attract the pencils of the recording brethren of the easel and lay like a virgin soil untouched by the plough”.