Westport on Foot: the Octagon, the Mall and the Carrowbeg

A town that was designed

Most Irish towns grew up over centuries, street by street, with no master plan. Westport is one of the exceptions. It was drawn up as a planned estate town for the Browne family from around 1767, and that design is still legible in the streets today. A short walk around the centre, half an hour to an hour at an easy pace, is the best way to understand why the place looks the way it does.

The first clear record of the new town is an advertisement in Faulkner's Dublin Journal in March 1767, announcing that a new town was to be built near the old one. The design is popularly credited to the English architect James Wyatt, who was completing Westport House in the 1780s, though the actual street plan is now attributed more to the local architect William Leeson. Either way, the intention was clear: a town laid out to a deliberate, elegant pattern rather than left to grow as it pleased.

Start at the Octagon

Begin at the Octagon, the eight-sided plaza where three of the town's streets meet. It is the centrepiece of the whole design, and it does exactly what a planned square should: it gives the town a focal point and pulls the streets together. The column in the middle was raised in the 1840s in memory of a local banker, George Glendenning. His statue had a rough time of it, decapitated by Free State troops during the Civil War, and the space at the top stood empty until a statue of Saint Patrick in Portland stone was placed there in 1990.

Down to the river and the Mall

From the Octagon, head down toward the Carrowbeg river, and here the planning shows its most distinctive touch. The river was canalised in the 1820s, straightened and walled between the tree-lined North and South Malls, with arched stone bridges crossing it. It is an unusual and rather beautiful arrangement, a river turned into a centrepiece, and it was done partly to dignify the approach to Westport House.

Walk along the Malls under the mature lime trees and you are walking the most photographed part of the town. Look for the bronze bust of Major John MacBride on the South Mall. MacBride, a leader of the 1916 Rising who was executed at Kilmainham and was once married to Maud Gonne, was born at the Quay, and the town keeps his memory here in the centre.

Up Bridge Street

From the Malls, climb Bridge Street, the steep spine of the town lined with painted shopfronts, pubs and restaurants. This is where Westport's other great identity lives, its traditional music, centred on Matt Molloy's. By day it is shops and cafés; by night it is the music street. The brightly painted fronts south of the river are a hallmark of the planned core, and they photograph beautifully in low Mayo sun.

Out to the Quay, if you have time

If you want to extend the walk, the planned town has one more chapter: the Quay. Westport's 18th-century harbour sits about 2km west of the centre, and a greenway spur links the two so you can walk or cycle out rather than drive. The restored stone warehouses there now hold seafood bars and bars, with Croagh Patrick standing across the water. It was the working port of the planned town, and it completes the picture of a place built, all of a piece, to a single idea.

Doing the walk

The core loop, Octagon to the Malls to Bridge Street and back, is around three to four kilometres and easy underfoot, all on town pavements. The Clew Bay Heritage Centre on the Quay runs guided historical walks if you want the full story from someone who knows it, but the town is compact and rewarding enough to read on your own. Take your time, look up at the buildings, and you start to see the plan the Brownes drew more than two hundred and fifty years ago.