A heritage walk through Ballina: the cathedral, the collection and the red-brick town

Ballina does not put its history behind glass and charge you for it. Most of the good stuff is on the street, free, or both, and the town is small and flat enough to take in on foot in a morning. This is a loose route rather than a strict one; start at the cathedral, work through the centre, and end at the river. Wear something for rain and you will be grand.

Start at St Muredach's

The obvious place to begin is St Muredach's Cathedral, the grey limestone landmark on the east bank of the Moy. Work began in 1827 under John MacHale, then Coadjutor Bishop of Killala, to a design by the Galway architect Dominick Madden in the Gothic Revival style. The stone was quarried locally, and the roof was finished before the Great Famine struck in 1845. The spire came later, completed in 1855 to a design by James Joseph McCarthy, one of the leading church architects of the day. It is worth stepping inside for the quiet and the scale, and worth standing across the river to see how the whole thing sits over the water. The cathedral gives Ballina its skyline.

Into the town: the red-brick streets

From the river, walk up into the centre around Pearse Street and the Market Square. This is the Victorian core, red-brick shopfronts and banks built when Ballina was a thriving market and milling town for North Mayo. The architecture rewards looking up: above the modern signage there is a lot of intact nineteenth-century streetscape. The town grew up at the lowest fording point on the Moy, which is what its Irish name, Béal an Átha, the mouth of the ford, records, and the bridges and the river are still the centre of gravity.

The Jackie Clarke Collection

The single best thing to do indoors in Ballina is also free. The Jackie Clarke Collection sits in the old Hibernian Bank on Pearse Street, a fine building in its own right. Jackie Clarke (1927 to 2000) was a Ballina businessman who spent a lifetime quietly amassing Irish historical material, and the scale of what he gathered is hard to believe: over 100,000 items spanning around 400 years. His widow gifted the collection to Mayo County Council, and it opened to the public as a museum.

What is in it is the surprise. Proclamations, handbills and pamphlets connected to Wolfe Tone, letters from Michael Collins, material linked to Michael Davitt, Douglas Hyde and O'Donovan Rossa, political cartoons, rare books, hunger-strike material and personal items connected to the leaders of the 1916 Rising, alongside works by the painter John Lavery. It is the kind of collection you would expect to find in a national institution, not on the main street of a Mayo town. Admission is free, and it is generally open Tuesday to Saturday, roughly 10am to 5pm; check current hours before you go, and budget an hour at least. Specialist tours can be booked ahead.

The Quay and the Ham

Walk back down toward the river and follow it to the Quay, the old port area where the Moy widens toward the estuary. Ballina was a working river port, and the Quay is where that history is most legible, with the river running broad and tidal below the town. The area around here, the Ham, is one of the older parts of Ballina, and it makes a pleasant riverside stretch to finish on, with a couple of places to eat and drink close by.

The Year of the French

Ballina's biggest moment in the national story came in 1798. In August of that year a French force of around a thousand men under General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert landed near Killala, just north of the town, to support the United Irishmen. Humbert took Ballina on his way south before the rising collapsed at Ballinamuck in the midlands. That summer is remembered in Irish history as the Year of the French. The episode is marked in the town by Humbert Street and the Humbert monument, unveiled in 1898 for the centenary, and the landing is re-enacted along the coast most years in the In Humbert's Footsteps commemorations each August. It is a small thing to walk past, but it is a reminder that this quiet market town was, for a few weeks, at the centre of an attempted revolution.

Finishing up

Ballina also produced people who shaped the country. Mary Robinson, the first woman to serve as President of Ireland, was born here in 1944, and there is a centre in the town dedicated to her life and work. Between the cathedral, the Clarke Collection and the river, you have a half-day that costs almost nothing and shows you a town with a great deal more history than its size suggests. End it the way the locals do, in a pub by the water, and you will have done Ballina properly.