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Ballydonnellan Castle

LOUGHREA, COUNTY GALWAY

All that remains today of the stronghold of the powerful O’Donnellan clan, who controlled lands between Lough Rea and Ballinsloe, is a ruin of a fifteenth-century tower and the substantial house grafted onto it in the mid eighteenth century. Ballydonnellan Castle is likely to have been built some time after 1412, an early fortress on the site having been destroyed by fire. The entire edifice was still standing when it was mapped in the 1890s, but had fallen into decay by the early twentieth century and is now in ruins. Fragments of its former glory, such as fine plasterwork, can be glimpsed through the ivy that has all but engulfed it.