Most people who recognise it do so through the famous ring, the gold or silver band bearing two hands clasping a crowned heart, which originated in this small fishing settlement just outside the old walls of Galway city. The design has become so widely reproduced and exported that it is easy to forget it belongs to a specific community, one that existed as a distinct and largely self-governing village for several centuries before the houses were demolished in the 1930s to make way for a social housing scheme.

The original Claddagh was not simply a neighbourhood of Galway but a separate entity, inhabited by a Gaelic-speaking fishing community who maintained their own customs, their own elected king or rí, and their own rules governing the fishing of Galway Bay. The community was long regarded as unusually cohesive, with traditions passed down through generations that set it apart from the anglicised town across the water. The ring itself, a design known formally as a fáinne Chladaigh, is thought to date to the seventeenth century, with various local families, particularly the Joyces, associated with its origin. By the early twentieth century, the physical village, with its thatched cottages clustered along the western shore of the Corrib where it meets the bay, had come to be considered a slum, and the clearance that followed erased nearly everything that had stood there. A small museum in the area now holds some record of what was lost.