Whilst I've explored lots of asylums and other abandoned remains with @Wastelandr I haven't really posted much on here so thought I would start doing some more. This place was one of about 17 asylums we visited on a 1,000 mile road-trip around Ireland - I'll leave it to Wastelandr to do one of his big roundup reports on the trip - but here's one of the places that we visited.
History:
A lot of the asylums in Ireland were built quite early and St Brigid's opened in 1833 as the Connacht Asylum, changing names to the Ballinasloe District Asylum in 1850 and 100 years later, in 1950, it was finally renamed St Brigid's after Saint Brigid, the patroness of healing and protection.
Opening with 150 beds, the asylum had a catchment area of 6,800 square miles, or 1.4 million people and overcrowding was a common issue.
Built in an 'X' shape, the asylum didn't have wards like later asylums, instead each corridor was lined with small rooms for patients. This meant that staff had to walk through locked wards to move around the site.
By the turn of the 20th century a new detached block was built to the north of the existing building - this could accommodate 260 patients and was a cheaper alternative to building a new asylum elsewhere. Patient numbers were at 1,800 by the 1930's.
Patient numbers started to reduce from the 1970's and the hospital finally closed in 2013, 180 years after it first opened.
Explore:
We arrived at the site at around 6pm with @Bugsuperstar who also joined us for the explore. What we thought would be something fairly easy to get into, proved a bit more tricky with recently boarded up windows and some pretty high hoarding which was too high to climb. Luckily we eventually found a way in, not how we expected...
We had a good couple of hours inside before it became dark, but fortunately we got to see the best bits. It appears that most of the beds and furniture have been moved however there's still some nice bits left.
Photos:
@Wastelandr in one of the padded cells
History:
A lot of the asylums in Ireland were built quite early and St Brigid's opened in 1833 as the Connacht Asylum, changing names to the Ballinasloe District Asylum in 1850 and 100 years later, in 1950, it was finally renamed St Brigid's after Saint Brigid, the patroness of healing and protection.
Opening with 150 beds, the asylum had a catchment area of 6,800 square miles, or 1.4 million people and overcrowding was a common issue.
Built in an 'X' shape, the asylum didn't have wards like later asylums, instead each corridor was lined with small rooms for patients. This meant that staff had to walk through locked wards to move around the site.
By the turn of the 20th century a new detached block was built to the north of the existing building - this could accommodate 260 patients and was a cheaper alternative to building a new asylum elsewhere. Patient numbers were at 1,800 by the 1930's.
Patient numbers started to reduce from the 1970's and the hospital finally closed in 2013, 180 years after it first opened.
Explore:
We arrived at the site at around 6pm with @Bugsuperstar who also joined us for the explore. What we thought would be something fairly easy to get into, proved a bit more tricky with recently boarded up windows and some pretty high hoarding which was too high to climb. Luckily we eventually found a way in, not how we expected...
We had a good couple of hours inside before it became dark, but fortunately we got to see the best bits. It appears that most of the beds and furniture have been moved however there's still some nice bits left.
Photos:
@Wastelandr in one of the padded cells
to think we almost didn't make it in! I'm never saying 'this one should be easy at least' ever again 
. Photos came out nice, saw a few bits I missed.
