An Druipseach · Co. Cork
A mill village strung along the R618 where the Dripsey River runs to the Lee - a tower house, two dead mills, and the ambush nobody here has forgotten.
Dripsey is a small mill village on the R618, about twenty kilometres west of Cork city, strung along the valley of its own river where it falls towards the Lee. The folder will tell you it is on the N22 - it is not. The N22 runs the high road to Macroom. Dripsey is down on the river road through Coachford, the slower way, the one that follows the water.
It is barely three hundred people and it comes in three pieces - Lower Dripsey, Dripsey Cross, and the Model Village that grew up around the woollen mill. For a place this size it has carried a surprising amount of history. There was a paper mill here from 1784 that printed banknotes for the Bank of England and employed four hundred souls at its height; there was a woollen mill from 1840 that wove blankets and tweed and shipped them to Canada and New Zealand and closed in the late 1970s. Above all of it, on a rock over the river, stands Carrignamuck, a fifteenth-century MacCarthy tower house, and a Georgian house grafted onto its estate.
And then there is the ambush. On a January day in 1921 the local IRA set a trap on the Coachford road and were betrayed before a shot was fired. The men who were caught were tried and five of them were executed. The village has not let it go, and it should not. Seamus Murphy carved the memorial. You drive past it on the way in.
There is one pub now, the Weigh Inn at the Cross, run by the same family since 1969 - no food, no music most nights, a fire in winter and the pint. The other pub closed in 2007, which ended Dripsey's brief moment of fame: the world's shortest St Patrick's Day parade, twenty-three metres from one pub door to the other. Come for the history and the river. Do not come expecting a day's worth of things to do. That is not what Dripsey is.
