Ballynahinch Castle

Ballynahinch Castle stands on the Owenmore River in central Connemara, at the edge of a salmon lough in the valley south of the Twelve Bens mountain range. The present building — a castellated Georgian-era house built in 1756 — is not the oldest structure on the site: c.1546, the O'Flaherty lord Dónal Ó Flaithbheartaigh built a tower house here around the time of his marriage to Grace O'Malley, the Connacht sea queen and clan leader. The O'Malley connection gives Ballynahinch one of the most specific and best-documented links to early modern Connemara history of any site in the region.

Grace O'Malley (Gráinne Mhaol) was the daughter of the O'Malley chieftain of Connacht — a clan with maritime power over the western approaches to Connacht and an extensive privateering operation that contemporary English administrators described variously as piracy and legitimate trade depending on their political mood. Her first marriage, to Dónal Ó Flaithbheartaigh of the O'Flaherty clan, brought her to Connemara, where the O'Flaherties held the territory west of Lough Corrib. Ballynahinch was associated with the clan from this period, though the tower house Dónal built c.1546 has not survived as a standing structure.

The Martin family acquired Ballynahinch through the Cromwellian land settlement that redistributed Catholic-held land in Connacht following the Confederate Wars of the 1640s. The Martins were one of the Fourteen Tribes of Galway — the Norman-Irish merchant families that had controlled the city since medieval times — and they built the present castellated house in 1756 on the O'Flaherty estate. The family held Ballynahinch for over two centuries, through the period of Irish Protestant Ascendancy and into the early 19th century.

Richard Martin (1754–1834) — 'Humanity Dick,' as King George IV called him — was the most remarkable member of the Martin family and one of the more remarkable individuals in Irish history. A Whig and then Liberal MP, a notorious duelist (fighting at least 100 duels by contemporary estimates), and a passionate advocate for animal welfare at a time when the concept had no legal recognition, Martin introduced the 1822 Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act to the British Parliament — the first piece of animal welfare legislation passed anywhere in the world. In 1824, he co-founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later the RSPCA, and in Ireland the ISPCA), establishing the institutional framework for animal welfare that remains in place today. He enforced his convictions personally, reportedly riding across Connemara to personally prosecute individuals he found mistreating animals, sometimes at the end of a pointed pistol.

The Martin estate was sold in the 19th century after the family's financial decline, and the castle passed through several owners before its most internationally famous resident. H.H. Ranjitsinhji — 'Ranji,' the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, Sussex and England cricketer, and universally regarded as one of the two or three greatest batsmen of the Victorian era — purchased Ballynahinch Castle in 1924. Ranjitsinhji, who had been the first Indian to play Test cricket for England (representing England rather than India, as India had no national team in the 1890s), was by this time the ruler of the Indian princely state of Nawanagar and a figure of considerable international celebrity. He bought Ballynahinch for the salmon fishing: the Owenmore River below the castle was, and remains, one of the most productive private salmon fisheries in Ireland, and Ranjitsinhji was a serious angler who spent significant time at the castle in his later years. He died at Ballynahinch in 1933.

The castle became a hotel in the 1930s and has remained one since. The building is genuinely historic — the 1756 structure with later additions — and the setting on the Owenmore River, with the salmon lough visible from the castle grounds and the Twelve Bens on the horizon, is exactly the Connemara landscape that the castle's history of remarkable residents suggests. Non-guests are welcome in the hotel bar and restaurant, and the riverside grounds are accessible during daylight hours — making Ballynahinch one of the few Irish castle hotels where the heritage experience is available to non-guests without a room booking.

The GYG Connemara Castles Tour from Galway (t388567) includes Ballynahinch alongside [Aughnanure Castle](/castles/ireland/aughnanure-castle) and [Kylemore Abbey](/castles/ireland/kylemore-abbey) — three completely different castle types in a single Connemara day.