When you hear the placename Athenry, the image that springs to mind likely relates to fields. Pete St John’s 1979 composition The Fields of Athenry is responsible for the association, but there’s much more to the Co Galway town than that.
Athenry is, according to the Irish Walled Towns Network, one of our best-preserved medieval towns. A significant proportion of its 14th century town walls, built some 600 years before St John had his moment, still exist.
Lifelong friends Anne Zonenblick and Ann Scully live in Athenry. They are joking together over coffee in the welcoming and atmospheric New Park Hotel on Cross Street, where teas and coffees have been brought to the table, along with delicious home-made baked goods.
Earlier in the day, Gerry Burke, a former teacher, provided a guided walking tour of the town. At Prospect, he pointed out a housing estate facing on to a green space, which forms a boundary with the local GAA ground, Kenny Park, home to the St Mary’s club.
An impressively long stretch of the wall survives here, which happens to be where Zonenblick lived as a child.
“I lived in Prospect, opposite the GAA pitch,” she says. “So we lived across the road from the wall. I recall a lot of young lads climbing the walls to get into the match for free. The field was a great place to play, especially for the boys.”
I ask why boys, in particular, liked to play there?
“The girls would not climb the wall,” she replies. “In those days we wore skirts. But I climbed the walls. I was determined I was going to climb those walls, but I didn’t want anyone to see me in case I failed on my adventure. I thought: ‘if the boys can do it, I can do it’.”
Zonenblick succeeded in her ambition when there was nobody else around to watch and judge.
Anne Zonenblick at the tower and wall beside Kenny Park GAA grounds. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy
“There was a flat place at the top,” she says. “I remember a sense of triumph. I had no concept of the age of walls then. They were just old walls. When you are small, they are huge.”
When she was 14, she got a camera as a birthday gift; a Box Brownie. “I went up the wall again and took pictures of the wall from there.”
All these years later, she was keen to show the photographs off, but could not locate them. “I looked for them, but I can’t find them. They were black and white pictures.”
What Frank Brody recalls most about Athenry’s medieval walls is that they blocked his view of the railway line that he loved when he was a child.
“It was all steam trains that time,” he says. “There was a turntable.”
Back then, Brody frequently climbed up and down the walls.
“You felt safe because the ivy was there,” he says, explaining how he used to hold on to the creeping plant for a more secure grip.
Gerry Burke beside the walls next to the GAA pitch in the Walled town of Athenry, Co Galway. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill 
Tower and section of the wall beside Kenny Park GAA grounds in Athenry. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy
Gerry Burke’s tour of the town took place on what was a typical Irish summer’s morning, in that there was intermittent torrential rain. At one point we were forced to seek shelter on private property, under a large tree, with pre-arranged permission from the owner.
After wrestling with a large iron gate, Burke led the way through an overgrown field where there is a long portion of wall. “This is what they call the ‘Ramparts’,” he said.
On the other side of this wall are the back gardens of a row of houses on Old Church Street. One of these was Frank Brody’s home.
“There were about 20 houses from our place all the way along that were backing on to the wall,” Brody says now. “We used to dump unused stuff out there, like pots and pans and odds and ends. There was no dump collection that time.”
Families did not, as Brody tells it, throw household rubbish over the wall; only occasionally items they no longer needed or wanted.
Veterinary surgeons Frank Brody and his son Justin outside their Athenry Pet Clinic, which is attached to one of Athenry’s towers and walls. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy 
Houses on Abbey Row beside Athenry Priory. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
Children, being the imaginative and resourceful, made use of this modern midden at the other side of their medieval garden walls. A young cousin of Brody’s, Paul, came up with the idea of “going to Dublin shopping”.
He did not mean boarding the steam train and travelling 188km to the capital city; he meant climbing over the wall to forage among the detritus of what their neighbours had discarded.
“The girls might dress up for the occasion,” Brody says.
What did they find when “shopping” in “Dublin”?
“You might get an old chipped mug or a cup. You could get a good oven or maybe a small kettle or something that was only slightly damaged. There were all kinds of slightly damaged things. There would be some clothes as well.”
One name that is repeated over the course of the day in Athenry is that of the late Etienne Rynne, who worked as an archaeology lecturer for many years at the University of Galway.
Athenry Heritage Centre, in the former St Mary’s church. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
By all accounts, Rynne, who came to live in Athenry, was proactive in promoting and mobilising the local community into an appreciation of their built heritage. He also was instrumental in setting up an active local historical society.
Juno Barrett name-checks Rynne when asked at what point he began to have an awareness of his hometown’s heritage.
“Etienne Rynne opened a historical society, and that showed us how important it was,” he says. “Gradually a group of people got together and established Athenry Heritage.”
Ann Scully says she had a sense of the town’s heritage as a teenager.
“For me as a young adult, I was always aware of the history of the arch at the North Gate whenever I was going through it,” she says. “I loved walking by the old abbey and still do. I am never not impressed by what it contains, and the history.”
Friends Anne Zonenblick and Ann Scully in front of Athenry Castle. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy 
Preserved tower and wall in Athenry. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy
About three decades ago, Scully recalls, “there was talk about knocking the North Gate to let the traffic pass.”
It didn’t happen. “We have to nurture an awareness of the heritage of the town,” she adds.
Alan Burgess is the director of Athenry’s charming Arts and Heritage Centre, which is located in a former church and accessed via verdant grounds.
The centre clocks up some 15,000 visitors a year, but Burgess would like to see more tourists visit Athenry in general.
“There are 16 trains a day coming through from Galway,” he points out.
Asked who is responsible for the maintenance of the town walls, Burgess replies: “It’s a unique aspect of Irish ownership; the people either side of the wall are responsible for either side.”
He adds that Galway County Council manages the conservation and protection of the walls. Invasive ivy, for instance, cannot be removed between March and September because this would interfere with nesting birds.
When Gerry Burke took me around the town to see the walls, he checked for traffic while passing under the North Gate, which looks like a small tower with a tall archway through it. We stopped right underneath, and I looked upwards, as instructed. There was a large space in the structure overhead. This was to house the portcullis, or whatever kind of gate was once there to keep people out. Had Burke not drawn attention to it, I would never have spotted this portal to the past.
“There’s a murder hole up there too,” he says, explaining this was a space also for guards to drop unpleasant things down on people trying to get illicitly inside the closed gates.
As a car passes beneath it, I wonder if the long-dead men who guarded the North Gate all those hundreds of years ago could ever have imagined a method of transport that was not a horse and cart going through. Or that a time would come when man would walk on the moon they could see in the night sky; and that one day, pretty much every adult resident of Athenry would own a small object called a smartphone that was able to tell them far more than they needed to know.
Athenry’s North Gate. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill 
Neill Ryan in his cobbler’s shop, Ryan’s Shoe Repairs, beside the North Gate in Athenry. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
Neill Ryan is a shoe and leather mender whose repair shop beside the gate is a social-history gem. It looks untouched by the decades, and the walls are covered in fascinating black-and-white photographs of the North Gate from down the years. His dog, Bailey, is asleep on the floor. There is a jar on the counter with the words “Cemetery Funds” written on it; Ryan helps with the burial ground’s upkeep.
Asked how he learned his trade, Ryan replies: “When I was at school, Dad gave me sliotars and leather schoolbags to stitch.”
These days, his customers are usually of the older kind.
“When they find a comfortable pair of shoes, they try their best to hold on to them,” he says.
As children in the 1970s, Ryan and his twin brother, Gary, would race each other to climb the North Gate, which was then in a far more ruined state than it is now. There were restoration projects in 1977 and again in 2019.
Which twin would usually get to the top first?
“It was usually nip and tuck between us.”
People I meet in Athenry repeat the same saying to me: that when the most handsome man in Ireland walks under the North Gate, it will collapse. Ryan also quotes it.
The truth is, the medieval North Gate possibly collapsed long ago without modern intervention, but it is also possibly best to tell Michael Fassbender, Paul Mescal and Colin Farrell to stay away from Athenry.
Next week: Part four – Fethard
How Ireland’s walled towns came to be
Part of the town wall at Robert Brennan Memorial Park, Abbey Street, Wexford. Photograph: (Nick Bradshaw)
By Eimear O’Connell
Irish walled towns are towns that have, or had, defensive walls. In Ireland, the earliest examples of these are associated with Viking or Hiberno-Norse settlements. Later, the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland brought with it a wave of town-building, starting in the southeast and expanding outwards.
The new Anglo-Norman towns were often built at or near existing monastic settlements or on the site of conquered Gaelic strongholds, and the majority of them were walled. This was as a defensive measure, to protect the town’s inhabitants from attack, but also as a means of controlling the trade of goods into and out of the town. Taxes and tariffs were applied at the town gates.
The earliest town ‘walls’ in Ireland were a combination of earthen ditches and timber palisade fences. By the 13th and 14th centuries these had mostly been replaced by stone walls, often with towers and wall walks and usually with several gates, giving access to the town from different directions. Today it is largely the stone walls, or remnants of them, that survive.
The towns featured in this series are all members of the Irish Walled Towns Network. The network was founded by the Heritage Council in 2005 and is delivered in partnership with local authorities and community groups in 33 member towns across the island.
The network supports the conservation of town walls and the regeneration of town centres in its member towns by providing training, funding and a forum for knowledge exchange.
Eimear O’Connell is built heritage officer and Irish Walled Towns Network programme manager at the Heritage Council