All the heritage sites in Roscommon I’ve never visited, and rectifying that in 2020.

Beyond her borders, Roscommon is one of those counties that everyone has passed through, but few have stopped in. It is to them what Carlow is to me. I was viewing a house in Cork one time and the landlady asked me if Roscommon was in Northern Ireland. Unless someone has a granny here, it’s likely all they know of Roscommon is the rejection of equal marriage in 2015.

I think we’ve internalised that a bit. It’s not that we don’t love our county, but we’re used of being unexceptional. Trumpeting Roscommon isn’t really a thing.

And yet, while trawling the internet to plan staycations and summer trips, I’ve realised that we’ve a heap of stuff in Roscommon worth visiting and bending everyone’s ears about. Before I go anywhere near a beach or an island this summer, I’m visiting every museum, famous grave and big house in Roscommon.  

I know a man who was brought to Knock on the train from an unnamed county in Munster every year of his childhood. In the forty years he’s been living ten miles from the shrine, he’s probably been in it twice. What’s on your doorstep is easily overlooked.

I came across a book the other day, The Landed Estates of County Roscommon by Paul Connolly, and of the homes and estates he writes of, I’ve seen one. I’ve written theses and treatises on Irish history but I’ve never visited the Douglas Hyde Centre outside Frenchpark.  I’ve been inside the Taj Mahal, but I’ve never been to Lough Key Forest Park. I travelled across America to see the Grand Canyon but haven’t gone to Tulsk to visit the Rathcroghan Center.

Lough Key wasn’t that big of a deal when I was small, and it’s hearing Dublin kids talk about it in recent years that’s made realise it’s quite something these days. Still haven’t gone though.

I have however gone to the Arigna Mining Experience below near Leitrim. It’s truly a fantastic tour; it’s as much a social or community story as it is an economic or industrial one. I don’t get credit for going though because that trip was as much about the promise of a dinner in Kilronan as it was about mining history.

If I’d known that the grave of the blind piper Turlough O’Carolan – love a good grave so I do – is in Ballyfarnan, I’d have swung by.

That’s the problem.  We’re not as well up on our county’s history because we were never instilled with the belief that there was much to learn.  

Right so, maybe everybody knows this, but Rathcroghan is a really big deal. It’s a four square mile collection of some 60 different monuments, the ancient capital of Connacht. Maeve, the queen of Connacht, reigned from there. It’s the starting and end point of the Táin Bó Cúailnge epic. It’s where Halloween started.

In Tulsk! 

There was an excellent Irish Times article on Rathcroghan, titled ‘It’s one of Ireland’s most important prehistoric sites, but you may not have heard of it’. As its website says, Rathcroghan is an archeologist’s dream. And while I’m stealing phrases from websites, Atlas Obscura – an international travel magazine dedicated to the world’s hidden wonders – described the area as a ‘key theatre of Ireland’s impressive collection of intoxicating mythology and literature’.

In Tulsk! Atlas Obscura made it to Tulsk and I haven’t. And I could cycle there.

Do you know what else is a big deal? Ireland’s National Famine Museum in Strokestown, which tells the story of the Great Hunger, the calamity that is the most significant event in Ireland’s history. I’ve never been in it, but it’s on my summer list. And it’ll be on my summer 2021 list too because they’ve secured funding for it to be be transformed into a state-of-the-art museum.

Clonalis House, that’s on the list too, the ancestral home of the O’Conors, Kings of Connacht and at various times, High Kings of Ireland. It’s in Castlerea, seven miles from me. I’ve been once, I think I was ten at the time.

And what of Roscommon’s native son, Douglas Hyde? First president of Ireland and founder of the Gaelic League, powerhouse of the cultural revival that set forth the long march to Ireland’s independence. His grave and a wee information centre are just outside Frenchpark, but that one has slipped by me too.

But why? I can’t help but think that if we were Mayo people, we’d know every plaque and visitor centre in the county. There’s certainly no fear of the Céide Fields being overlooked or passed over.

It’s somehow very Roscommon to have the oldest and largest unexcavated royal site in Europe in our midst – a site on a par with Newgrange and Tara – and to not instinctively trumpet it.

Maybe we’re just the keep-the-head-down kind of people and don’t want to brag. Or maybe we’re in the habit of looking west to Mayo and Galway for sites of cultural importance. Maybe all the sites are just not very well marketed.

Roscommon lost a third of its population during the Famine and with it some of its soul; our acceptance of ordinariness is a result of that loss. We’re just too used of seeing our innovators and pioneers leave; rarely do they get to hone their crafts at home.

But there’s also something very Roscommon about astonishing people with gems like Rathcroghan, the Famine museum and the remarkable Boyle Abbey. We do surprises well; we’re a great county for electing renegades (a later blog post perhaps), you could never rule us out year on year in the football and the county has its own distinctive styles of traditional music.

If I ever end up teaching down here, the children will know everything there is to know about every plaque, big house and historical site in the county. I just have to go visit them myself first.

Museums, galleries, and other cultural outlets will reopen on 20 July. There’ll be no football Sundays for a while and we’re going nowhere for the foreseeable – Lanzarote and Lake Garda will have to wait for another year. With the long summer ahead of us, maybe now’s the time for a poke around the treasures local to us. And maybe if we go and visit these places, learn about them and their significance, we might get a bit better at selling Roscommon – not just to tourists, but to ourselves too.

We’ll be bigger doses than Mayo people before we know it!

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