Scoil: St Brigid's Convent, Mountrath (uimhir rolla 13343)

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1. Leinster Steel at Waterloo - The Tale of a Town

   

   Roinn Roinn Postáil

   LEINSTER STEEL AT WATERLOO?
   A READER who appears to be in the Stáit-seirbhís (as they say in the Gaeltacht, I hope) complains about my allusions to my Uncle Tom "the crusty Civil Servant."
   The reader says "Not all Civil Servants are crusty."-Well, who said they were?I spoke of my Uncle as the crusty Civil Servant and surely that indicates that he is the exception to the rule. All the other 999,999 Civil Servants now extant are not crusty.
   ...Don't mention it. Always a pleasure to put a reader's mind at ease.

   Freddy's Latest.
   MY uncle says that what makes him crusty is the hotel fare. When he is turned away from the doors in the town of the Three Black Days and goes on to some other town, he gets yesterday's soup warmed up and whatever Bill the Bagman has left of the chicken,- just the wishing-bone.
   Crusty? Ah yes; but to know all is to forgive all, as Freddy Flaherty told his schoolmaster when given the stick for a bad exercise that his Dad had worked out for him overnight.

   All About Mountrath.
   NOT THAT my Uncle always finds his travels dull. I never saw him in better humour than after a recent visit to the Midlands. They must have done him well, as the poets say; for he could not stop talking of the beauty and the traditions and the hospitality of his discovery.
   "Do you know Mountrath?" he asked.
   "Do I know the alphabet?"- I answered.
   "I have my doubts," he replied.
   " What I mean," I went on, ignoring his effort at back-chat, "is that Mountrath is a place that I have gone through many and many a time, on happy journeys across Leinster, with Slieve Bloom running along the sky northward and lovely, sedgy boggy land to the south."
   THAT pleasant little town in Leix,- so I went on to tell my Uncle,-is most notable of all because of some green hillocks, that mark one of the olden, famous, sacred sites of Ireland, Clonenagh.
   Angus the Culdee flourished there, the most famous of Ireland's religious poets, over a thousand years ago; and Angus himself was the subject of an admired poem, Aengus a hoenach nime.
   Angus of the Heavenly host,
   Here are his grave and tombstone;
   Hence it is he sent through death
   On Friday into Heaven;
   In Clonenagh he was nursed,
   In Clonenagh buried;
   In Clonenagh of many crosses
   First he read his psalms.

   Leinster Steel.
   MOUNTRATH to-day is one more of scores of our country towns, sleepy, grass-grown, with gaunt idle walls that tell of a lost prosperity.
   What were it's industries of old?
   My Uncle Tom told me "This town", he said, employed hundreds of workers, at the beginning of last century, in mining and smelting iron. The metal was sent down the Nore in flat-bottomed boats to New Ross, for export. Mountrath steel was Aused in the making of weapons during the Napoleonic wars, and it is likely that many a poor Frenchman way bayonetted with steel from Leix at Waterloo!
   THERE WERE forests around Mountrath in those days. They were hewn down for the smelting, and when they were gone, a little before the Famine years, the industry died; although it is held that the smelting could have been done with turf.

   Industries of Old.
   MOUNTRATH's example was one of scores. The woods of Ireland, which were the retreat of the "rebels" in olden days, were got rid of by the simple process of setting up smelting works. When the woods were burnt, the smelting was abandoned.
   A map showing all the places, from Kenmare to the Glens fo Antrim, which were stripped of trees thus, would be a great revelation.
   MOUNTRATH had other industries-a distillery, brewery, malting, oil mill, spinning and weaving, a tobacco factory, soap and candle making and glass works and nail-making.
   It maintained 8,000 people; but the industries died out, and the population dwindled.

   The Wheel Turns Full Circle.
   HERE the O' Moores had their castle and held out in Leinster's superb struggle long ago - Leinster's battle before the Reformation.
   At last the Irish power was thrown down, and Sir Charles Coote, that famous persecutor of the Irish race, set up his proud house and demesne here, in the Plantation days. Under the protection of the Cootes, strangers came into Leinster and worked in Mountrath's industries, - and they became Irish speakers, so irresistible was the Gaelic tradition.
   THE CATHOLIC chapel, in the days of Mountrath's prosperity, was a miserable thatched building by the river, from which water had to be bailed on Saturdays. There were two hedge schools, on of which lived on till 1835 at Shanahoe under a famous teacher named Moloney.

   

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