placenamesLowe's Town
Lowe's Town survives as a historic name for part of Galbally, linked with the Low family, coaching traffic and the transfer of landed estates to tenants.
The name
A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
- Lowe's Town · English · main form
Place & story
A corner house on the old map
The national architectural survey identifies the area around Galbally's Corner House as Lowe's Town on the first-edition Ordnance Survey map. The house, dated to around 1780, preserves both a decorative rendered shopfront and a smaller timber shopfront on its eastern side. The inventory associates it with Bianconi's coaching service, while a plaque records horse-changing on the Clonmel-to-Cork route and conversion to dwellings in 1836. The building ties the older place-name to a particular part of the town's commercial streetscape. [2]
The Low family connection
The University of Galway's Landed Estates database traces the Lowtown and Sunville branch of the Low family through Peter, a son of Simon Low of Galbally. Peter's son John lived at Sunvale and held property across several County Limerick parishes, including Galbally, at the time of Griffith's Valuation. A later owner, Lieutenant Colonel John Maxwell Low, held more than three thousand acres in Limerick during the 1870s. [3]
Tenants and land purchase
Lowestown appeared in a parliamentary question on 28 July 1908, when Thomas Lundon asked about estate sales around Galbally, including Mr Lowe's property and its tenants. Augustine Birrell replied that sale proceedings for the Lowe estate had been instituted before the Estates Commissioners. He distinguished that step from negotiating individual agreements: applications could be considered, but the commissioners would not themselves open negotiations between landlords and tenants. The exchange documents a process under way, without establishing its final outcome. [4]
Geographic information
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Lowe's Town. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Corner House, The Square, Galbally, registration 21810001 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
- Lowe, Sunvale/Sunville, estate 2412 · University of Galway, Landed Estates
- Land Purchase in County Limerick, 28 July 1908 · UK Parliament, Hansard
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2026-05-20. How this page was prepared.