Thomas Russell, 1767-1803
The man from God knows where
Thomas Russell was born in Dromahane in November 1767. He joined the army young, served in India, and on his return fell in with Theobald Wolfe Tone - the two of them, with others, founded the Society of United Irishmen in 1791. Russell was the movement's organiser and conscience, a man more interested in principle than tactics, and he paid for it: arrested, jailed, and finally hanged in 1803 for his part in the abortive rising of that year. In County Down, where he is buried, he became "the man from God knows where", the title of a much-loved ballad by the Bangor poet Florence Mary Wilson. The local GAA club, Thomas Russell's, carries his name to this day.
Kilshannig burial ground
A graveyard with a long reach
The old graveyard at Kilshannig, north of the village, is the kind of small field that turns out to be full of consequence. Daniel O'Connell's maternal ancestors are buried here. So are the parents of Thomas William Croke, the nationalist Archbishop of Cashel and Emly who became the first patron of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884 - which is why the GAA's headquarters in Dublin is called Croke Park. The Liberator's people and the Archbishop's people, in one north Cork parish. St Peter's Church in the village itself was finished in 1904 and renovated in 1956.
An O'Callaghan house, c. 1610
Dromaneen Castle on the river
Down on the Blackwater between Dromahane and Lombardstown stands the ruin of Dromaneen Castle, a National Monument. It is a Jacobean fortified mansion, said to have been built by Caher O'Callaghan around 1610 to replace an older tower house, and it was one of the three main castles of the O'Callaghan clan. The family lost it in the Cromwellian settlement of the 1650s, when the land was granted to one of Cromwell's generals, Sir Richard Kyrle, after the Down Survey. The shell still sits above the river, ringforts scattered through the townlands around it.