Ireland – Wandering Toward the South Coast

Early on a Sunday morning, with very light traffic, we escaped from the Dublin metropolitan area.  Our eventual goal was the south coast of Ireland but we quickly got off the M7 Motorway so we could see more of the countryside at a more leisurely pace…

We thought that it was a good start for our day when Laurie spotted this horse wandering along the road… You never know what you’ll see when you’re a little off the main routes!

It was Sunday, so not too much was going on in the little town of Castlecomer…an area from which part of Laurie’s brother-in-law, Bill’s family, might have emigrated from. 

Castlecomer is a former coal mining town in County Kilkenny.  It has a population of about 2,200 residents.  The ‘castle’ in the name refers to a long gone castle built nearby by the Normans in 1171.  The earliest record of a settlement here dates from ca. 1200 when William Marshal, 1^st Earl of Pembroke erected a motte (mound) and built a castle on it.

Laurie and her sister Bonnie posed for this photo at the entrance to St. Mary’s Parish Church at the town of Castlecomer.   Much to my surprise, St. Mary’s is a member church in the Anglican Church of Ireland...not the Catholic Church.

 

The Catholic Church in Ireland (including Northern Ireland) has a total of 3,700,000 members.  The Church of Ireland is second in total members with about 375,000 members, only 126,000 or so in the Irish Republic itself with the remainder residing in Northern Ireland…   

Saint Mary’s Church stands on the site of the ancient parish Church of the Holy Cross.  It dated to ca. 1374 but no traces of it remain.  In 1637 the area was conveyed to Christopher Wandesford.  He built the current church.

The town of Castlecomer itself was destroyed in the 1798 rebellion.  Subsequently Lady Anne Ormonde offered incentives for rebuilding the town and she restored Saint Mary’s Church…

Notes:

·         The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a short-lived uprising against British rule in Ireland.  French forces with 14,000 troops attempted to aid the Irish forces but were deterred by rough seas and were either captured or had to turn back.    The area around Castlecomer was one of the worst sites of retribution by the British with the massacre of captured and wounded rebels… To learn more about this rebellion, just go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Rebellion_of_1798.

Castlecomer Discovery Park opened to the public in 2007 with the launch of its “Footprints in Coal” exhibition, a visitor’s center and this grouping of craft studios.  The park is set in the former grounds of the 18^th century Wandesforde Estate.  This park began as a community project to rejuvenate the town of Castlecomer itself.

FYI…Coal mining continued in the area until 1969!

Since it was fairly early on Sunday, there wasn’t too much going on at the Castlecomer Discovery Park, but we did go through the Visitor’s Center to see what the park was all about.  These buildings are all located in what was originally the farm yard and kitchen gardens of the estate.

There were a lot of photos on display in the visitor’s center showing the estate back in its more recent heydays… This particular picture, one of my favorite themes, shows the arrival of the first passenger train in Castlecomer on 2/21/1921.

Other photos showed the Estate Yard in 1914 and two family members on horseback and in uniform at the estate gates.  The estate’s horses were requisitioned for service in Northern France at the outbreak of WWI.

As you can see from this photo and the one that follows, the Castlecomer Discovery Park is very much a work in progress. 

The town itself was laid out in the 1600s by Christopher Wandesford.  The town owed its development to the wealth generated from the coal mines.  Castlecomer not only served as a market town for the area, but it was an ‘estate village for the Wandesford family, who owned the mines.  Some homes in the town itself date all the way back to the 1640s…

Castlecomer House, which was the family home of the Wandesfordes, was located on the opposite side of N78 across from what is now the Castlecomer Discovery Park.  After the first house was burned down during the Battle of Castlecomer in 1798, Lady Anne Ormonde built another massive home in 1802.  Apparently it was very big and very imposing… It is reputed to have had 365 windows, one for each day of the year!

To learn more about the Castlecomer Discovery Park and its many activities, including trail rides on horseback, go to https://www.discoverypark.ie/.

We then headed down the road…following our GPS rental unit.  That proved to be a challenge more than once as she took us down some ‘interesting and sometimes challenging’ roads on the most direct route to our next destination.

The sisters were just happy to see the woman along this little back road with her dogs!

…and of course we had to stop and visit!  The lady was very friendly and her dogs were curious.

…did we stop to chat or to admire the dogs!?  What a nice smile!

Here’s one more photo of the Irish countryside in County Kilkenny.  The narrow road is actually wider than many of the roads that we traversed in Scotland…

We would both like to thank whoever developed or provided that wonderful and proper voice giving directions via the GPS unit.  She was invariably polite, never rasping out “Recalculating”, but rather taking any missteps in stride, accepting my direction and gently providing adjusted directions.  Never once, in Scotland or in Ireland, was I told to ‘make the next legal U-turn!’ 

A bit further on down the road, we stopped to ask directions from this local resident.  We couldn’t communicate well with her though as her native tongue was Irish Gaelic…

In my next post from Ireland, we reach our destination for the day…Kinsale on the south coast just a little south of the City of Cork.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for coming along on our journey!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave