Binghamstown was a landlord's village from its first day. Major Denis Bingham laid it out in 1796 specifically to provide services for the Bingham estate, which dominated the Mullet Peninsula. A castellated house went up that same year on the northern reaches of Elly Bay, complete with outbuildings, offices, and gardens. The Binghams were among the most powerful landlord families in Connacht, and Binghamstown House was a statement of that power as much as a residence. Nothing substantial of it survives now. The foundations sit low and grass-covered, traceable but not legible, the way most landlord houses in the west of Ireland eventually went. The village itself was tied so tightly to the family that when the family declined, so did the village.

For twenty years after Binghamstown was founded, there was no proper road into Erris from the rest of County Mayo. The main road from Castlebar was not built until 1817. It only reached the extremity of the peninsula in 1824, and by then a younger and more energetic town, Belmullet, was establishing itself at the isthmus. The fair at Binghamstown, recorded by Samuel Lewis in his 1837 Topographical Dictionary of Ireland as taking place on 'the first day of every month throughout the year,' was the village's economic heart. The toll gate was Bingham's response to seeing that heart slow. It worked for a while. By the end of the nineteenth century, the fair had collapsed.

Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, gave Binghamstown what was probably its last good notice: 'A good view of Saleen bay,' he reported, where 'a landing pier has been erected by the late Fishery Board.' The pier was the kind of small infrastructure that could have changed everything if shipping had favored it. It did not. The Atlantic trade that William Carter envisaged for Belmullet a few kilometres north never quite materialised either, but Belmullet at least had two bays and a canal between them. Binghamstown had Elly Bay, a sheltered inlet on the eastern side of the Mullet Peninsula, and the gentle waters off Saleen. It was a quiet location for a quiet outcome.

By the 2011 census, the townland counted 106 people across roughly 3 square kilometres. The village sits on the R313, the regional road that runs the length of the Mullet Peninsula from Belmullet south toward Blacksod. Drivers passing through see a small cluster of houses, a few signs, the sweep of the bay to the east. The name on the road sign is given in both English and Irish: Binghamstown above, An Geata Mór below. There is no gate now. There has not been a gate for well over a century. But the name records, every day, the moment when a landlord tried to charge his neighbours for the right to do business in someone else's town, and lost.