Dún Guairne · Co. Cork
A small East Cork farming village that, through its hurling club, won an All-Ireland for Cork in 1902 - and that sits in the parish where the worst single defeat in the IRA's War of Independence was fought out.
Dungourney is a small farming village in East Cork, on the R627 about nine kilometres northeast of Midleton, with the river Dungourney running through it. The centre is St Peter's Roman Catholic church, the national school across from it, and a post office. Roads run off in several directions toward Midleton, Castlemartyr and Tallow. This is good dairy and tillage country, gentle and worked, the kind of parish where most of the life happens on the land and on the pitch.
What gives the place its outsized reputation is hurling. East Cork is one of the strongest hurling territories in Ireland, and Dungourney is one of its old names. When the club won the Cork county championship in 1902, under the rules of the day the county champions represented Cork in the All-Ireland - so a village of a few hundred people was, in effect, the Cork senior team that won the 1902 title. The club's captain, Jamesy Kelleher, was a full-back good enough to be named on the GAA's Hurling Team of the Century decades later.
The other thing this parish carries is Clonmult. On a Sunday in February 1921, a flying column of the Fourth Battalion, First Cork Brigade was caught in a disused farmhouse at Garrylaurence, near the hamlet of Clonmult in this parish, and twelve of them were killed - the heaviest single loss the IRA took in the whole War of Independence. Two captured men were later executed in Cork. There is a memorial at the site, and the local schoolhouse keeps the story.
Be honest about what is here for a visitor. There is no hotel, and the village pub closed years ago, so this is not an evening's entertainment - it is a stop, a piece of GAA and revolutionary history, and a working East Cork parish. The nearest of everything practical - shops, pubs, restaurants, the Jameson distillery, the train to Cork - is in Midleton, fifteen minutes south. The one proper family attraction in the parish is Leahy's Open Farm, out on the R627.