Rathtoe, Ráth Tó, Co. Carlow

Ráth Tó · Co. Carlow

A crossroads on the Burren River, named for a rath that outlasted everything built after it.

Rathtoe is a small settlement in north Carlow, sitting on the Burren River roughly halfway between Carlow town and Tullow. The 2022 census counted 296 people. There is a church, a credit union in what used to be a school, and the crossroads that most people drive through without stopping. That is an honest description of the place, and it is not a criticism.

The name gives something away. Ráth Tó - the rath of whoever Tó was - means that someone of enough standing to build an earthwork homestead settled here before the Normans rearranged the county. The parish itself is Gilbertstown, named for the Norman incomer who replaced the earlier arrangement. The rath is older than the name on the map. There is still a ringfort within the townland, though what condition it is in depends on which field boundary you are looking at.

The other anchor is Fighting Cocks GAA, established in 1928 and based at Kilcoole, a couple of kilometres west. The club won the Carlow Senior Football Championship in 1938 and has accumulated six junior titles across the decades. For a settlement this size, that record is not nothing. The GAA ground is the kind of place where the car park fills on a Saturday afternoon and the parish assembles in a way it does nowhere else.

St Patrick's Church dates to around 1890 - Gothic Revival, cruciform plan, a truncated tower that did not quite make it to its intended height. It is on the Record of Protected Structures, which means the county council has noticed it is worth keeping. The credit union building beside it started life as a school in 1837. The same two buildings frame the crossroads now as they have for most of the village's legible history.

Population

296

Coords

52.787° N, 6.799° W

01 / 05

At a glance.

Three things every local will eventually mention. Read these and you've already understood more than most day-trippers do.

01 The name

Ráth Tó: someone's ringfort, long gone.

The village is named for a rath - an early medieval earthwork homestead - that stood in the townland. The ringfort is gone or largely absorbed into the farmland. The name stayed.

Stories & lore → 02 The GAA

Fighting Cocks, est. 1928.

The local club has been going nearly a century. Their grounds sit about 2 km west of the village at Kilcoole. One senior championship, six junior titles, and the kind of club that is quietly the whole social life of the parish.

Stories & lore → 03 The river

The Burren: 39 km from Mount Leinster to Carlow town.

The Burren River rises on the north face of Mount Leinster and flows through Rathtoe before turning west toward the Barrow. It carries brown trout, Atlantic salmon, and the occasional lamprey. The name comes from the Irish for rocky land.

Stories & lore →

02 / 05

Stories & lore.

The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.

When the earthwork outlasts the record

The rath and the name

Rathtoe's Irish name - Ráth Tó - identifies a ringfort belonging to someone called Tó, a name that turns up nowhere else in the documentary record. Ringforts were built by farming families of means between roughly 500 and 1200 AD: circular earthwork enclosures, bank and ditch, sometimes a souterrain. They were homesteads and statements of standing in one structure. Most of Carlow's raths are gone or reduced to a low mound in a field corner. The one at Rathtoe gave the village its name and then mostly vanished. The name is the only part of it left with any legibility.

Carlow football, 1889

The first championship

The first Carlow Senior Club Football Championship was played in 1889, a year when the GAA was barely three years old. The winners were O'Gorman-Mahon's, a combined club drawing from the parishes of Kilbride, Ballon and Rathoe - Rathtoe's parish included. They beat Tullow Stars and Stripes 1-01 to 0-00. The Carlow football championship has been running ever since. The Fighting Cocks, formed from the same general territory in 1928, are the lineage that came out the other side.

A name nobody has satisfactorily explained

Fighting Cocks GAA

Fighting Cocks GFC was established in 1928 at Kilcoole, west of the village. Where the name comes from is not on the official record - cockfighting was common in rural Ireland through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and would have happened at crossroads and fair greens across Carlow, but nobody has pinned the specific origin. What is documented: one Carlow Senior Football Championship (1938), one intermediate title, six junior titles. The club runs football in a parish of under three hundred people. That is either remarkable or exactly what you'd expect from a place with nothing else competing for the Saturday afternoon.

Mount Leinster to the Barrow, 39 kilometres

The Burren River

The Burren River - An Bhoirinn, the rocky land - rises on the north face of Mount Leinster and runs north through Rathtoe before bending west to meet the Barrow at Carlow town. Thirty-nine kilometres in total. It carries brown trout and Atlantic salmon, and in the cleaner stretches, lamprey - a jawless fish that has been in Irish rivers since before the ice sheets. The Burren is the most prominent tributary the Barrow picks up in Carlow. In Rathtoe it is a field-width river, quiet, unremarkable to look at, and a reason the settlement is where it is.

03 / 05

When to go.

There is no bad time. There are different times.

Spring

Mar-May

The Burren runs well after winter rain. Mount Leinster is clear on dry days. A good time to drive the north Carlow roads with nothing pressing.

◉ Go

Summer

Jun-Aug

GAA season in full swing at Kilcoole. Long evenings on country roads. The surrounding farmland is at its most workmanlike and the river is low.

◉ Go

Autumn

Sep-Oct

County championship finals come around in October. The Burren fills after rain. Mount Leinster visible from the crossroads on a clear morning.

◉ Go

Winter

Nov-Feb

The village quiets to its baseline. The church and the credit union keep going. Nothing here shuts that was open before, which is an honest way to put it.

◐ Mind yourself

04 / 05

What to skip.

Honestly? Don't bother.

If a local was sitting beside you, this is the bit where they'd lean in.

Coming for food or a pint

There is no pub and no café in the village. Carlow town is 12 km west and Tullow 10 km east - either will sort you.

Walking the Burren River from here

The river runs through the townland but there is no marked riverside walk in the village. The Barrow Way, 15 km east at Bagenalstown, is the organised walking route in the county.

Visiting the GAA grounds outside match days

Kilcoole GAA grounds are a couple of kilometres from the village and are a club facility, not a visitor attraction. County final day aside, there is nothing to see.

Getting there.

By car

Carlow town to Rathtoe is about 12 km - take the R726 toward Tullow and turn off at the Rathtoe crossroads. Tullow is 10 km further east. From Dublin, the M9 to Junction 5 then the N80 to Carlow puts you 30 minutes away.

By bus

No regular bus service stops in the village itself. Tullow and Carlow town are the nearest Bus Éireann stops, both about 10 km away. A car is the practical option.

By train

No station. Nearest is Carlow town on the Dublin-Waterford line, then 15 minutes by car.

Next on the tour

Co. Carlow

Carlow

12 km south-west. The county town, with the castle ruin, the cathedral, and the Cathedral Quarter cafes.

Co. Carlow

Tullow

10 km east on the R726. A market town on the Slaney with the 1798 memorial to Father John Murphy at its centre.

Co. Carlow

Rathvilly

12 km north on the R725. A Tidy Towns regular under the Wicklow foothills, with the Slaney running past it.

Co. Carlow

Ballon

Five kilometres north-west on the N80, with a Bronze Age cemetery on the hill above the main street.