Tobar Pártnáin · Co. Cork
A hilltop crossroads that was once a famous September horse fair - they say Napoleon's horse was bought here. Now a quiet parish with a church, a well and a point-to-point.
Bartlemy is a hilltop crossroads village in north-east Cork, in the civil parish of Gortroe, a few kilometres east of Rathcormac and about ten north of Watergrasshill. The name is an anglicisation of Saint Bartholomew - the Irish, Tobar Pártnáin, points at the holy well that gave the parish its identity. It is good farming country, high and open, the kind of place you pass through rather than stop in.
It was not always quiet. For a couple of centuries this crossroads was a proper commercial centre - shops, public houses, a library, a butter market, and above all a horse fair that drew buyers from well beyond Cork. The fair, reputedly running since the 1600s, is the thing Bartlemy is remembered for, and the story that travels furthest is that Napoleon's charger Marengo was bought here by a French army agent. Take that one with the salt it deserves, but the fair itself was real and large.
The fairs faded in the 1930s and the commerce went with them. The post office, built around 1860, closed in 1991. What survives is the church of around 1820, the holy well below it, the national school still busy with ninety-odd pupils, and the point-to-point course out at Hightown. Rathcormac is the nearest village with a shop and a pub or two; Fermoy, about twelve kilometres north on the Blackwater, is the nearest town with real services.
Come here for the heritage of a fair town that emptied out, the quiet of a high crossroads, and - if your timing is right - a spring afternoon at the races. Do not come expecting a destination. Bartlemy is a parish that works, not a village that performs.