A Brief History
on the
Parish of
Castlegar
Famed for its sporting and cultural traditions, the parish of Castlegar lies to the east of of the City of Galway, wedged between Galway Bay to its south and west and Lough Corrib and River to its north and east.

The parish of Castlegar emerged in or around the 1790s. But its history goes back thousands of years with much of its heritage dictated by its natural environment of rivers, lakes and wetlands. A crannog (an Iron Age habitation built on an artifical island) can still be seen today at the southern end of Ballindooley Lough . The river Corrib previously spread its waters via its tidal Terryland (Sandy) River tributory over 240 acres of land which eventually disappeared underground in a large swallow hole in porous limestone rock located at the back of the present-day Glenburren Park.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, there were no roads for the people of Menlo to travel to the city except by crossing from Ballindooley over to the Tuam Road.
Then a large drainage scheme was initiated by the construction of a wall along the eastern side of the river Corrib. Work began on this dyke wall in 1844 out of stone quarried from the area of modern day Tirellan Heights.
The appropriately named 'Dyke Road' was opened in 1845