The road Collins was on
Béal na mBláth
Béal na mBláth - the mouth of the flowers - is a townland a short drive west of Crookstown, and on 22 August 1922 it became the most consequential few hundred yards of road in the new Irish state. Michael Collins, by then commander-in-chief of the National Army, was ambushed there in the early evening and shot dead, the only fatality of the action. He had passed through the area that morning and was likely making for Crookstown when the convoy was caught. After the ambush his body was carried back through Crookstown village and on towards Cloughduv. A simple memorial cross now stands at the ambush site; the commemoration held there every August draws crowds and, traditionally, a keynote speaker from front-line Irish politics. The lane that climbs to it from Crookstown is barely altered in a hundred years, which is much of the reason people make the trip.
Clodagh, Castlemore, and Thomas Crook
Two castles and a planter
The village owes its English name to Thomas Crook, a planter who settled here in the plantation era - hence An Baile Gallda, the town of the foreigner. It sits between two older ruins. South of the village is Clodagh Castle, a sixteenth-century tower-house ruin once held by a branch of the McSweeney clan, a gallowglass family. North of the village is Castlemore Castle, also called Dundrinan, another ruin. Neither is a managed visitor site - they are field ruins, best viewed with respect for whoever farms the land around them - but together they mark Crookstown as a much older place than the plantation village that took the name.
Crookstown Road station, 1866 to the 1940s
The line that came and went
For about eighty years Crookstown had a railway. The Cork and Macroom Direct Railway opened in 1866, and Crookstown Road station stood roughly two kilometres from the village near Castlemore Castle. The line carried the area for the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, then closed to passengers and finally shut altogether in the 1940s. A mill built around 1810 at Bellmount had been the earlier engine of the local economy. In the War of Independence the village saw its share of trouble: Crookstown House, the Warren family estate house, was burnt out by the IRA in June 1921 and later rebuilt. The brick and concrete works at Castlemore is the industry that outlasted them all.