Westport (, historically anglicised as Cahernamart) is a town in County Mayo in Ireland. It is at the south-east corner of Clew Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean on the west coast of Ireland. Westport is a tourist destination and scores highly for quality of life. It won the Irish Tidy Towns Competition three times in 2001, 2006 and 2008. In 2012 it won the Best Place to Live in Ireland competition run by The Irish Times.
Westport is designated as a heritage town, and is one of only a few planned towns in Ireland. The town centre was laid-out in the Georgian architectural style, and incorporates the Carrow Beg river into the design composition. This provides for tree lined promenades (known as The Mall) and several stone bridges.
The pilgrimage mountain of Croagh Patrick, known locally as "the Reek", lies some 10 km west of the town near the villages of Murrisk and Lecanvey. The mountain forms the backdrop to the town.
History
Early origins and name
Westport originates and gets its name in the Irish language from a 16th-century castle, Cathair na Mart (meaning "the stone fort of the beeves"). A small port also existed at the mouth of the Carrowbeg river. Roads led from the village to the west (West Road), the south (Sandy Hill Road) and the east (Old Paddock Road).
Westport House and 18th-century beginnings
Westport's origins are tied to the Browne family. The Brownes were a noble family from Sussex, England, who arrived in Mayo in the 16th century and gradually acquired land around the county, particularly in the Westport area. Their position was strengthened in the later 17th century when Colonel John Browne, a Jacobite who had fought at the 1691 Siege of Limerick, married Maude Bourke, the great-great-granddaughter of regional soveign Grace O'Malley (), thereby inheriting rights to lands that had previously belonged to the Bourke and O’Malley families. Seeking to establish a grand residence that reflected their power, the Brownes constructed Westport House in the 18th century, initially built on the site of an Ó Máille castle at Cahernamart. The earliest version of the house stood without a lake or dam, with the tide rising and falling against its walls. From the 1730s onward, the estate was rebuilt and expanded, most notably under the direction of the German architect Richard Cassels, and later Thomas Ivory and James Wyatt. The finished house was set within parkland, with landscaped gardens, terraces, and a lake, symbolically asserting the Brownes’ authority in Mayo and anchoring the planned Georgian town of Westport that grew around the estate.
John Browne, 1st Earl of Altamont intended to move the existing Cahernamart settlement to facilitate landscaping of parklands around Westport House; this intention was outlined to Richard Pococke when he visited Browne in 1752. Workmen were to contact Peter Brown-Kelly, son of the Earl, or the architect William Leeson.
In 1778 Peter Browne, 2nd Earl of Altamont engaged James Wyatt (1746–1813) to redesign parts of Westport House, including its dining room. This engagement fostered a lasting belief that Wyatt was the town's designer, but work on the town was already well advanced when Wyatt began work. If he had any design input into the town project it could only have been to later stages such as the Malls.
19th-century townscape and mapping
The town's street plan follows medieval principles of urban design introduced by the Normans in the 13th century, with a particular emphasis on the incorporation of the river into the composition. Low stone walls contain the river for two blocks and produce, on each side, tree-lined promenades (The Mall) with several stone bridges over the river Carrow Beg. The Malls were constructed by the First Marquess of Sligo after 1800. William Bald's map of Mayo, surveyed between 1809 and 1817, and Henry Browne's map from the same period, show that the basic framework of Westport's streets, including the Malls, was present by the early 19th century. The original architectonic plans for the town, however, are not available.