Guide To Galway
GREAT for a night out. Cool vibe. God awful buskers. Galway is known for many things, but there is so much not widely known by the general public about the county referred to most famously as The Stoned County. WWN presents a guide to that beloved county, Galway:
Galway city is often described as a ‘student’s town’ and this is because in 1999 some intrepid students noticed a loophole in local council laws which allowed any student to purchase the town for a single pound provided they carried out the transaction entirely in the nude while singing the words to the Fields of Anthenry. Conor Gormely, a student at the time, did just that, and Galway city has been owned by students ever since.
Known for its status as a port city, Galway has always been one of the most reliable places to smuggle in drugs and prostitutes, even during the great prostitute drought of 1701.
The town of Clifden is home to Ireland’s first ever cliff, which was built some 200 years before the cliffs of Moher, by Scottish stonemasons in 1758.
Students have left an indelible mark on Galway county as a whole, with their obvious love for smoking weed evidenced by the dense fog which often envelops the county during college terms, most visible in the run up to exams.
Galway’s largest export remains people named ‘Mick’.
People of Galway are a largely polite and timid sort, who are easy to get on with, but an ancient tradition sees them join together every 100 hundred years to partake in a ritual known as ‘The Cleansing’.
Last carried out in 1915, the county is set again this year to carry out one night of immense violence and carnal conviviality in December which will see Galway natives kill or sleep with one another in a state of wild abandon.
The county’s famous Eyre Square wasn’t always a square. As recently as 1978 Eyre Square was referred to as Eyre’s Rhombus, owing its name to the titular character in Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. Bronte wrote much of the novel in the location now known as Eyre Square and in the book she described Jane’s bottom several times as ‘hideously rhombus-like in shape’.