Tuam, in north County Galway, seems instead to have accumulated it all at once, and then left much of it where it fell. Occupying a steep rise on the southern bank of the River Nanny, above a fording point and hemmed in by bog to east and west, the town was already old when it became important, and important in ways that most Irish towns never were. What remains is a small, navigable place threaded through with ecclesiastical ruins, absorbed structures, and fragments that require a little patience to read.

The Irish name, Tuaim-da-ghualann, meaning something like the ridge of the two shoulders, describes the topography well enough. St Jarlath founded a monastery here in the early sixth century, and the settlement he established would eventually grow, under the patronage of the O'Conors, the kings of Connacht, into one of the most significant ecclesiastical centres in the country. In 1152, at the Synod of Kells, Tuam was named as one of just four metropolitan sees in Ireland, placing it alongside Armagh, Cashel, and Dublin in the formal hierarchy of the reformed Irish church. The O'Conors built a castle here in 1161, and documentary sources from the early thirteenth century already refer to suburbs, houses, and a licence for an annual fair, suggesting a functioning urban settlement of some scale. The ecclesiastical geography alone is remarkable: within roughly a kilometre of the town centre there survive, or formerly survived, the chancel of a Romanesque church and a fourteenth-century Synod Hall, both incorporated into the later gothic revival cathedral of St Mary; the Abbey of the Holy Trinity; Temple Jarlath within a probable early ecclesiastical enclosure; Templenascreen in a second enclosure on Bishop Street; St John's Priory on Circular Road; a third enclosure at Toberjarlath on the Athenry Road; and St Brigid's Chapel near Vicar Street. Fragments of four high crosses, those tall carved stone crosses that were among the most ambitious artistic productions of early Christian Ireland, also survive across the town. Later centuries added an eighteenth-century bishop's palace, a pre-Emancipation chapel, a vertical watermill, a windmill, and the enigmatic structure known as the Chair of Tuam.

For anyone willing to move slowly through the streets, Tuam rewards close attention. The gothic revival cathedral on the main street contains the absorbed Romanesque chancel and Synod Hall within its fabric, meaning that two genuinely medieval structures are folded inside a nineteenth-century building. Temple Jarlath stands within what is thought to be an early ecclesiastical enclosure on High Street, and the scatter of surviving cross fragments is distributed across several locations in and around the town centre.