Qualla: Roundstone, County Galway

Roundstone, County Galway: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trish Steel, CC BY-SA 2.0. The English-language name Roundstone is, almost certainly, a translation error. The Irish original is Cloch na Ron - 'rock of the seals'. Ron means seal, not round, but the Ordnance Survey cartographers who anglicised Irish place names in the nineteenth century either heard wrong, guessed wrong, or simply preferred the homophone. The mistake stuck. There is, in fact, a strikingly round stone at the entrance to Roundstone Bay, which has only deepened the confusion. The bay was being called Round-stone Haven as early as 1684, in the writings of Roderick O'Flaherty, so it is possible the two names emerged independently. Either way, the village has lived with its translated name for two centuries now, and the seals are still in the bay.

Image: Trish Steel | CC BY-SA 2.0

Roundstone, County Galway: A Village Built to Order

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jw.usher, Public domain. Most Connemara villages grew without anybody deciding they should. Roundstone is different. In the 1820s, the Scottish engineer Alexander Nimmo was working his way across the west of Ireland, building roads, harbours, and houses on commission from the Irish Board of Works. As par...

Image: Jw.usher | Public domain

Roundstone, County Galway: Painters of the Western Light

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lisa Harbin, CC BY-SA 2.0. Roundstone became, somehow, a magnet for Irish art. Paul Henry - whose paintings of Connemara mountains and skies defined how a generation of Irish people pictured their own country - worked here. So did Jack B. Yeats, the painter brother of W.B. Yeats and arguably the greatest I...

Image: Lisa Harbin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Roundstone, County Galway: The Regatta and the Hookers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian Matz, CC BY 3.0. Every July the village hosts the Roundstone Regatta. The boats that race in it are not modern racing yachts but Galway hookers - the traditional working sailboats of Connemara, black-hulled, rust-red-sailed, with hulls shaped to handle Atlantic swell while carrying turf or fish o...

Image: Julian Matz | CC BY 3.0

Roundstone, County Galway: Looking Outward

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0. Roundstone is twinned with Noyelles-sous-Lens, a suburb of Lens in northern France - an unlikely pairing on the face of it, since one is a coal-and-industrial town and the other is a fishing village, but the partnership reflects the long historical reach of the West of Ireland: e...

Image: Postdlf | CC BY-SA 3.0