Headford sits on the eastern shore of Lough Corrib, the second-largest lake on the island of Ireland. The Black River runs past the town on its way west into the lough, forming the county boundary with Mayo. For centuries the river has drawn anglers after its trout, and the small harbour at Greenfields - about 6.5 kilometres west - is the town's gateway to Corrib itself. The whole landscape here belongs to that broad transitional country where the limestone pastures of east Galway slope down to the wetter, lake-scattered west. Drive any of the small roads radiating from the square and you find yourself in a patchwork of stone walls, hedgerows, and one-storey farmhouses, much of it unchanged in pattern since the 19th century.

Headford has a tradition you would not necessarily guess from the modern streetscape. The town was once a centre of lacemaking, producing in a style known as Torchon - delicate, geometric work made on a pillow with bobbins. The craft has been recognised on Ireland's National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and a small community of modern lacemakers still keeps it alive. A public artwork called Lace Matrix, an iron-and-lace sculpture inspired by the tradition, marks the craft's place in the town's identity. In 2024 the artist Tarmo Thorstrom installed a renewed piece called Cyclogenesis - the meteorological term for a storm's birth - threading the old work into something that speaks of weather, of place, of pattern repeating.

Walk or drive northwest from the square and within minutes you reach Ross Errilly Friary, locally called Ross Abbey though strictly speaking it had no abbot. It is among the best-preserved medieval Franciscan friaries in Ireland: cloisters, kitchen, fish tank, refectory, bell tower, all roofless now but still standing. The Franciscans were expelled from it seven times over two centuries of religious turmoil, and the bell, according to local memory, lies somewhere in the Black River where the fleeing monks dropped it in 1656 to keep it from Cromwell's soldiers. Even John Ford filmed there briefly when he made The Quiet Man in 1952.

Two and a half kilometres west of Headford, in the townland of Ower, the ruined medieval church of Killursa marks the older Christian footprint of the area. It was dedicated to Saint Fursey, the seventh-century Irish monk whose name still attaches to a local Ladies GAA club and a primary school in nearby Claran. Fursey is one of those early Irish saints who slipped quietly into the cultural memory of half of Europe - he travelled to East Anglia and to France and was famous for his recorded visions, which the Venerable Bede thought important enough to retell. In Headford he is simply local, a name carved on stones and worn smooth by weather.

Headford is twinned with Le Faouet in Brittany and with Morgan Hill in Santa Clara County, California - one tie to the old Celtic west of France, another to the wider Irish diaspora that has scattered Galway names across the American continent. The town has one secondary school, Presentation College Headford, with around 780 pupils as of late 2019; three primary schools in surrounding villages; rugby, Gaelic football, and ladies' GAA clubs; and a small library with a book club for children and one for adults. It is, in other words, the sort of working country town that holds together by its institutions and its festivals - Headfest among them - rather than by anything visible from a high altitude. To understand it, you have to come closer to the ground.