NUIG hosts seminar and exhibition on Galway’s landed estates
NUIG will host a half-day seminar, Galway Estates from the Archives, on Saturday, August 24, from 9.30am to 1.30pm.
The conference will coincide with a photographic showcase on Galway Estates taking place at NUIG from August 19-24. These events have grown out of a collaboration between the University, Galway County Council Heritage Service and the pioneering Skehana Heritage Group.
Hundreds of photographic images of Great Houses – some intact, some ruined, some whose memory only exists on the landscape in the form of a map or drawing from an earlier century – will be on display in banner format in the foyer of the O’Donoghue Building, from August 19 to 24, as part of Heritage Week.
The exhibition will also include facsimile copies of leases, maps, memoirs and marriage settlements from more than 20 archival collections of landed estates housed in NUIG’s James Hardiman Library’s Archives and Special Collections.
Big Houses and estates employed hundreds of people – before changing times and the Land Act hastened their demise in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Unfortunately, their method of operation frequently involved coercing tenants and peasant farmers, which created an increasingly unsustainable economic model.
The estates’ demise principally came about in the first decades of the 20th Century when government-sponsored Land Acts advanced money to tenant farmers to purchase their holdings and become owner/occupiers.11
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
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