On 27 August 1798, a small French expeditionary force under General Jean Humbert, joined by a few thousand poorly armed Irish rebels, marched into Castlebar from the north. The British garrison defending the town outnumbered them and had artillery. Within an hour, the British soldiers were running, and they did not stop running for thirty miles. The rout was so total, so embarrassing, that for the next two centuries people in Mayo called it not a battle but a race. The 'Races of Castlebar' is still the only major military victory ever won by a French-Irish force on Irish soil. A short-lived Republic was declared. It collapsed within weeks when British reinforcements arrived. But for one extraordinary day, a Mayo town that had grown up around a thirteenth-century Norman castle became the centre of the French Revolutionary war in Ireland.
Around 1235, a Norman family called de Barra, anglicised to Barry, arrived in this part of Connacht and built a castle on the banks of a small river. The Irish called the castle Caisleán an Bharraigh, the Castle of Barry, and the town that grew up around it took the same name, Castlebar. The de Barras held it for a while, then lost it to the Burkes, who lost it in turn to English-aligned forces. In 1586, Sir Richard Bingham, the Governor of Connacht and one of the more brutal English administrators of the Elizabethan period, granted the castle to his brother Sir John Bingham. This was the start of two and a half centuries of Bingham rule in Castlebar. The Binghams were eventually made Earls of Lucan, and the third Earl of Lucan in particular became one of the most hated landlords in nineteenth-century Ireland.
George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, inherited his estates just before the Great Famine. The famine reduced the population of Castlebar from 5,404 in 1821 to 3,022 by 1861, mostly through emigration and starvation. Lucan made the catastrophe worse. He carried out mass evictions of tenants who could not pay rent, knocking down their cottages and clearing the land for cattle and sheep. He earned the nickname 'The Exterminator', and the name stuck. He is the same Lord Lucan who, a few years later, would order the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in the Crimean War, suggesting a certain consistency of judgment. The fourth Earl was much more popular locally, lowered rents and donated land. His successor gave the town centre park, known as the Mall, to the people of Castlebar in 1922, partly in atonement for what the family had done. The park is still there. So is the bitterness.
On 21 October 1879, in the Imperial Hotel on Castlebar's main street, Michael Davitt founded the Irish National Land League. Davitt was a Mayo man from nearby Straide. He had lost an arm in a Lancashire textile mill at the age of eleven, served seven years in English prisons for Fenian gun-running, and come home to Mayo to find his neighbours being evicted by absentee landlords like the Binghams. The Land League's aim was direct: break the power of Anglo-Irish landlords, secure tenant rights, and ultimately get Irish farmers to own their own land. It worked, slowly. Through boycotts, mass meetings, parliamentary pressure, and acts of resistance both peaceful and otherwise, the League and its successors transferred most of Irish farmland from a few thousand landlords to roughly half a million tenant families by the early twentieth century. It all started in a Castlebar hotel.
In 1939, with war breaking out in Europe, a small group of Jews fleeing Central Europe ended up in Castlebar. They established the Western Hat Factory, which opened officially on 1 May 1940. One of the founders, Marcus Witztum, used his Irish business and travel papers to help other Jews escape Nazi persecution, in a quiet operation that has earned him the posthumous nickname 'The Irish Schindler'. The hat factory employed local women and continued operating for decades. The Jewish community that briefly thrived around it became known as 'Little Jerusalem'. They are largely gone now, the survivors and their descendants having dispersed to Dublin, London, Israel, and America, but the hat factory building still stands on the edge of town, and historians have begun to recover the story of how a remote Mayo county town briefly became a refuge from the Holocaust.
Castlebar has produced two Taoisigh, the Irish heads of government: Charles Haughey, born here in 1925, who served three separate terms in the role between 1979 and 1992, and Enda Kenny, born here in 1951, who served from 2011 to 2017. The town's other famous exports are unusually varied. Louis Brennan, born here in 1852, invented the steerable torpedo and the monorail. Margaret Burke-Sheridan, born in 1889, was a major Italian opera soprano. Sally Rooney, born in 1991, is the novelist whose Normal People and Conversations with Friends became the defining literary voice of her generation. The town today has a population of 13,054, a campus of Atlantic Technological University, the only branch of the National Museum of Ireland outside Dublin (the Country Life museum), and a relief road that finally opened in 2023 after fifteen years of planning. The castle that gave the town its name is long gone. The town it founded is still here.
Castlebar sits at 53.86°N, 9.30°W in central County Mayo, on the N5 between Westport and Ballina. The town is the county capital and the largest settlement in Mayo. Best viewed from 3,000-5,000 ft AGL. Ireland West Airport Knock (EIKN) is approximately 25 nm east; Galway (EICM) about 50 nm south-southeast. MacHale Park (28,000-capacity GAA ground) is one of the most visible landmarks. The town has its own old airport site (former IATA: CLB), now a retail park.