Nunnery'. There is nothing on the ground today to confirm that confidence. No visible surface trace of the structure survives, and for generations the site was misidentified in the historical record as a Dominican foundation. It was neither.

Dangan House was originally the seat of the Martins, a Connacht family of some standing. In February 1839, at the request of George Plunkett Browne, the bishop of Galway, the Ursulines, a Catholic religious order with a long tradition of teaching, established a foundation there. The arrangement was short-lived. When bishop Browne was appointed to the see of Elphin in December 1844, the Ursulines departed Galway and moved first to Summerhill near Athlone, and later to Sligo, where they maintain a convent and school to this day. Their stay at Dangan had lasted barely five years. This detail was obscured for a long time by a passage in which the writer William Wilde, visiting in 1867 and publishing his account in 1872, described the house as 'the original seat of the Martins, lately converted into a nunnery, but now deserted even by the benevolent sisters', phrasing that implied the community had only recently left. In fact they had been gone for more than two decades by then. The house itself was most likely demolished later in the nineteenth century during the construction of the Galway to Clifden railway line, and whatever remained was absorbed into the altered landscape the railway brought with it.