Emerge from Lynch's Castles onto the street at right angles to Shop Street. Turn left up Abbeygate Street. Before you leave the vicinity of the Castle, notice the protruding structure on the wall to your left, about 10 feet above the ground. This was the castle toilet (garderobe) which emptied directly onto the street, where there was probably an open sewer. The door on this side of Lynch's Castle was the main entrance .. so you now understand why an ancient bye-law of Galway demanded that citizens clean outside their doors once a week, or suffer a fine!

Walk to the corner. At the end of the street ahead stood a second gate to the city, called the Little Gate. Standing at this corner you can look back down the long street and see the other end. This is were the opposite wall stood (along where Merchant's Road now runs). You can get a glimpse of the extent of the medieval city - quite small by our standards, but in its day the second largest in Ireland, and Ireland's second-busiest port.

Turning left here, after some steps you can see on the your right the massive pile of the modern Catholic Cathedral. Completed in 1965, it stands on the banks of the Corrib, and is well worth a visit in itself.

Farther on, on your left is an unusual structure, called the Lynch Memorial Window (4). A plaque tells you it commemorates the 'stern and unbending justice' of the local magistrate Robert Lynch Fitzstephen, who hanged his own son for the murder of a Spanish merchant in 1493. This story was not written down for some 150 years, but it is quoted as an example of the civic piety of the great Galway families who would not hesitate to put city before family. In this view, Lynch snr. had in mind the continuance of the city's lucrative Spanish trade rather than a devotion to abstract justice. The story parallels that of the legendary Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, who executed his own sons for treason. The story tells us that these stern republican virtues were also common in Galway, ruled (like the Roman Republic and the great Italian cities of the Middle Ages) by its leading families.

The wall itself has an unusual history - it is definitely not an ancient medieval housefront. In fact it was put together in the mid-19th century by the Town Commissioners of that time, who wished to commemorate Galway's most famous legend. It cannot be a coincidence that at this time, a new breed of traveller called the 'tourist' was arriving in Galway. So you are looking at an artifact of authentic nineteenth-century 'heritage tourism'! Incidentally, the verb 'to lynch' (i.e. to hang a person illegally) does not seem to stem from this incident. Instead it comes from a Lynch of colonial Virginia, who may have been a descendant of the Galway Lynches. If this is true, as an American visitor once remarked, it does show that this family had 'a remarkable affinity for the rope'!

Across the street from the Lynch Memorial Window and down the lane with the lovely title of 'Bowling Green' is the tiny Nora Barnacle Museum (5). This was the home of the Barnacle family, of which Nora was one of several daughters. She was a rebellious young woman in staid and strait-laced Galway at the turn of the century, who flew the coop to Dublin. Working in Finn's Hotel, near Trinity College, she was accosted one day in 1904 by a young man named James Joyce. Four months later they eloped to Europe.

Joyce visited Galway twice and used some of the Nora's early life in his works, most famously in 'The Dead', called the most perfect short story ever written. Nora was also the model for Molly, the unfaithful wife of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. In the book, Molly is a Jew from Gibraltar, a touch of the exotic that Joyce found in Galway, with its legendary links to Spain, and its shawl-clad women. Incidentally, despite his name, Joyce's ancestral connections with Galway are unknown, if any ever existed. The name Joyce is closely associated with the city - something which probably attracted the lovers in the early stages of their relationship.

The house is now a small museum, dedicated to the couple. It is the smallest museum in Ireland, and well worth a visit.

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