Search Results for 'Banba Hotel'

This aerial photograph was taken c1945. On the left you can see the Eglinton Hotel which was originally built in the 1860s. Up to that time, Salthill was a small village that included Lenaboy Avenue and the area between what we know as Seapoint and the Bal. The construction of the Eglinton was on a scale not seen before in Salthill, and it extended the village to the west. It came at a time when locals were beginning to promote the village as a resort, a destination for tourists.

This 1948 photograph was taken from the old RIC barracks which was opposite the Banba Hotel . The bit of a wall you can see in the immediate foreground was part of ‘The Lazy Wall’. There was a concrete seat running along the other side of this wall and it was there people known as the ‘Fámairí’ used to congregate, people mostly from farming families. When they had the harvest in, they would come to Salthill on holiday and often meet with the same people as last year. They would sit here and gossip, smoke their dúidíns and sometimes paddle in the sea beside them.

Busking is the practice of performing in public places, street performances for tips or gratuities, voluntary donations. It may come from the Spanish word buscar – to seek (fame and fortune), or the Latin word buscare – to procure, to gain.

This wintry photograph of part of Salthill was probably taken during the war as there are no vehicle tracks in the snow, indeed there are no vehicles to be seen. The shop on the right was built by a Miss Burke who came here from Castlerea in 1935. It was a grocery and sweet shop with advertisements on the wall outside for plug tobacco.

Physically, of course, Salthill has changed dramatically since the early years of the last century when the beaches were rocky, and the scattered houses and lodges offered sea baths and confined bathing geared for the protection of women’s modesty. Men, no doubt, could show off their swimming and diving skills with abandonment, but could risk becoming the subject of comment (adverse or otherwise) of a unique Salthill ‘People’s Parliament’ known to all as the Lazy Wall.

The building which houses the Garda station in Salthill was originally called Forster Park and was constructed as a summer house by the Blake Forster family at the end of the 18th century. In 1850, it was bought by the Palmer family who were well known whiskey distillers, flour millers, and makers of porter. Most of their business was based in Nuns’ Island. Their coat of arms can still be seen on the facade of this building. We can presume that Palmer’s Rock (sometimes known as Saunder’s Rock), on the shore in front of this house, was named after a member of the family.