Reimagining Life on the Road: A Traveller Community Mapping Project

Join us on our journey to document and share stories of traditional Traveller camp sites, taking place in Galway during Heritage Week 2024.

This workshop will take participants through the development of the project to date where we will create a deliberative dialogue space to discuss the development of the project and our plans for the future.

This act of commemoration during Heritage Week serves as a special reminder of the enduring spirit of the Traveller community, who are custodians of beautiful stories and memories of times gone by.

People are invited to come along and listen to members of the Traveller community share their memories of life on the road and to be part of this exciting project mapping Traveller heritage for future generations.

The highlight of this workshop will be an interview with Nora Corcoran describing her memories as a child of living at Poolboy, a traditional camp in Ballinasloe and marking this historic site as a symbol of Traveller nomadic heritage and culture.

The project will commemorate the connections between the people and places through planting a hazel sapling at each site. These saplings were given to us by our friends from the Terry Land Forest Park and have been gathered from the Sandy Road area which is the site of one of the traditional Traveller camps in Galway city.

"The Hazel tree has a long-standing association with the Traveller Community, it is associated with care, wisdom, spiritual protection, bodily shelter and was often the wood of choice in the creation of a loban, a shelter tent." Oein De Bhairduin

Image: Michael Ward Ballinasloe with dog outside a traditional camp. Circa 1960. Courtesy of Nora Corcoran.

Parking is available at the Cathedral and on the roadside, however people should be advised that parking everywhere in the vicinity of the University will be in great demand due to conferring.

Overseen by artist Seamus Nolan, and supported by Oein De Bhairduin, Traveller Culture Collections Development Officer at the National Museum of Ireland. The project is a collaboration between Galway Traveller Movement, the Department of History and the Centre for Creative Technologies, in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies at the University of Galway. Supported by the Heritage Council under the Community Heritage Grant Scheme 2024.