Ballymacmoy, 1724, to the Charente
Richard Hennessy and the cognac
Ballymacmoy House sits at the highest point of the village, half hidden in trees. Richard Hennessy was born there in 1724, the youngest son of the family. At twenty he left for France to serve in the army of Louis XV, was wounded at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, and settled by the Charente near the town of Cognac, where he went into brandy. The house he founded became one of the best-known cognac names in the world. The family never lost the Irish house: a later generation rebuilt it around 1818, and an eighth-generation Hennessy has restored it. In 2015 the family brought fifty-odd Cognac producers back to Killavullen to mark the brand's 250th anniversary. The cognac is French. The name is North Cork.
Ballygriffin, 1718
Nano Nagle's birthplace
Honora 'Nano' Nagle was born at Ballygriffin, the townland next to the village, in 1718, into a Catholic landed family at a time when Catholic education was outlawed. She went on to set up a clandestine network of schools for poor children in Cork city and founded the Presentation Sisters, an order that spread schools across the world. The Nagle family farm at Ballygriffin is now the Nano Nagle Birthplace, a heritage, spirituality and ecology centre on an organic farm signposted off the N72. There is a heritage room, prayer and icon rooms, and a Killavullen farmers market on the second Saturday of the month. It is the one organised visitor site in the parish.
Bear, wolf, reindeer and a human skull
The bone caves
On the south bank of the Blackwater at Killavullen Bridge are limestone caves that have been known and used for a very long time. When the antiquarian Thomas Crofton Croker came in the early nineteenth century, one of them was the home of the village blacksmith. An excavation in 1934 went deeper and pulled out the bones of brown bear, wolf, reindeer and the giant Irish elk - animals long extinct in Ireland - along with a human skull. The caves are not a managed visitor attraction; they are simply there in the riverbank rock, and the gorges above the bridge are topped with old castellated houses, some ruined, some not.
Edmund Burke learned his letters near here
St Nicholas and the hedge school
The village church, dedicated to St Nicholas, was built in 1839. The older church foundations in the area are attributed to fifth-century saints Nicholas and Craebhnait. Long before the present church, Edmund Burke - the eighteenth-century statesman and political thinker - received some of his early education in a hedge school in Killavullen, the kind of informal, often outdoor school that taught Catholic children when their formal education was banned. Between Burke's hedge school and Nano Nagle's network, this small place has an outsized claim on the story of Irish education.