28 June 1798
Father John Murphy
Father John Murphy was a Catholic curate at Boolavogue in north Wexford — a moderate man by all accounts, who had counselled his parishioners against joining the United Irishmen. The government's pre-emptive arms searches in late May 1798 changed his position entirely. He led the rebel pikemen who won at Boolavogue on 26 May, fought at Oulart Hill, Enniscorthy and New Ross, and kept the rebellion alive in Leinster for two months when most expected it to collapse in days. Crown forces caught him in the Kilcomney hills on 26 June. They brought him to Tullow two days later. He was stripped, flogged, hanged from a gallows on the green, and decapitated. His head was set on a spike above the courthouse. His body was burned in a barrel. He was fifty-two years old. The ballad 'Boolavogue' — written a century later, in 1898 — has the line 'Father Murphy of County Wexford swept o'er the land like a mighty wave'. The actual end was a spike in a Carlow market town.
The battle nobody won
1798 in Carlow
The 1798 rebellion in Carlow had its own catastrophe before Murphy's execution. On 25 May, rebel forces attempted to take Carlow town. The Crown garrison had been forewarned. The fight on Tullow Street lasted hours and the rebels were massacred — several hundred dead, many of the bodies burned. Hacketstown, twenty kilometres north-east of Tullow, saw its own battle on 25 June, the day before Murphy was captured. The whole county was a theatre of the rebellion, and Tullow's place in it — as the town where its most famous leader was publicly destroyed — is the most deliberate and visible piece of that story.
A working river
The Slaney
The River Slaney rises on Lugnaquilla in Co. Wicklow, runs through Baltinglass, passes through Tullow, and meets the sea at Wexford Harbour — 130 kilometres in total. For most of that length it is a game fishing river: brown trout throughout, sea trout in summer, salmon in better years. Tullow is roughly the midpoint. The Carlow County Angling Association manages the local stretches and day permits are available. The river was also the historical reason for the town's location — Tullow sits at a crossing point — and the old stone bridge on Bridge Street is the structure that put the town where it is.
A Field Marshal and his demesne
The Wolseley Connection
Mount Wolseley takes its name from Field Marshal Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley — the British army's commander-in-chief at the end of the nineteenth century and the man who served as the model for Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Very Model of a Modern Major-General'. The Wolseley family had the estate here in Tullow parish for generations. Garnet himself was born at Golden Bridge House in Dublin, but the family connection to this part of Carlow is deep enough that the demesne still carries the name. The hotel was built into the estate buildings in the 1990s and the golf course runs across what was farmland and formal grounds.