Galway Lost
The Vanished Browne Mansion
Lower Abbeygate Street, Galway City
Most people in Galway know the Browne Doorway. It stands in Eyre Square, separated from any house, looking almost as though it was built simply to be a monument.
But the doorway once belonged to something much bigger.
On the west side of Lower Abbeygate Street, close to its junction with St Augustine Street, stood the Browne Mansion — one of the substantial town houses belonging to Galway's wealthy merchant families.
The exact age of the house is not quite as simple as the famous date carved into its surviving doorway. Historical accounts have placed an earlier Browne house on the site in the sixteenth century, while the elaborate entrance associated with Martin Browne and Marie Lynch carries the date 1627. By the time Galway's famous pictorial map was made in 1651, the building was already important enough to be identified as the mansion house of Martin Browne.
And this was no small house.
An architectural description from the nineteenth century records a three-storey building, with a courtyard behind it and an external staircase giving access to the upper floors. Old descriptions and images show a tall merchant house occupying the street rather than the isolated piece of stonework we recognise today.
It also stood in distinguished company. Abbeygate Street was part of the tightly built commercial heart of old Galway, and other great merchant houses stood nearby. The Brownes themselves possessed more than one substantial house in this part of the city.
Time was less kind to the mansion than it was to its carved entrance.
During its later life the old house was divided into shops and tenements. A photograph from around 1870 already shows what are described as the remains of the Browne Mansion on Lower Abbeygate Street. By the beginning of the twentieth century the building was in a ruinous state and its survival was coming to an end.
The house disappeared, but part of its face was saved. The great stone doorway, together with the oriel window above it, was removed and eventually re-erected in Eyre Square in 1905.
The ground it left behind did not remain frozen in time. An archaeological excavation carried out on the original site in 1990, ahead of redevelopment, found the area heavily disturbed by later building. Foundations uncovered there were thought to belong mainly to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only scattered pieces of cut stone survived as evidence of earlier activity.
Which means the vanished Browne Mansion is not somewhere we can only visit on an old map.
We can still walk down Lower Abbeygate Street today, reach the junction with St Augustine Street, and stand at the place where one of Galway's great merchant houses once stood.
Then, only a short walk away, we can find part of that same house standing in Eyre Square.
Galway did not lose the Browne Mansion without leaving a clue.
We have been walking past the clue for more than a century.
Observation By: Bam Artiste