Richardson’s / Jack Foley’s Pub: The Gallows Beneath

When builders lifted the pavement outside this pub in 1984, they expected pipes, not bones. What they found stopped the city. Eleven headless skeletons lay in a neat row beneath the street, their graves unmarked for centuries. Historians confirmed what old maps had hinted: this corner was once Galway’s gallows. From the late 1400s through the 1700s, the condemned ended their days here under the authority of the 1484 charter granted by King Richard the Third, which allowed the city to rule itself and punish wrongdoers. More than a hundred offences could bring you to the rope, from treason and theft to the crime of letting pigs roam free on the city streets. Public executions drew crowds. The bodies were buried where they fell, and the heads were taken for display on spikes above the gates of the walled town. When the workmens’ shovels uncovered those bones in 1984, it was the first time daylight had touched them in almost three hundred years. Locals who watched the excavation remember an odd silence after the eleventh skeleton was lifted, as if even the traffic on Eyre Square had paused to listen. In the weeks that followed, people swore the air outside the pub felt colder than anywhere else on the square, a chill that lingered long after the last bones were removed.