Lios Cúil · Co. Cork
A working farming village between Midleton and Fermoy, with one good family pub, a hurling club, and more famous sons and daughters than its size lets on.
Lisgoold sits in the rolling farmland of East Cork, on the old road from Midleton up to Fermoy, about six and three-quarter miles south-south-east of Rathcormac. The name is Lios Cúil - the ring-fort of the corner or nook - and that is roughly what it still is: an enclosure of good land in a quiet corner, in the barony of Barrymore and the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne. Midleton is the town you go to for anything practical, ten kilometres or so to the south.
This is not a destination village and it does not pretend to be. There is a church, a hurling pitch that the parish lives around, one pub, and minor roads in all directions. What it has instead of attractions is people. For a place this small it has put a startling number of names into the wider world - a T.S. Eliot-shortlisted poet, a viral country-music family, and one of the best jump jockeys in Ireland all came out of these few townlands.
Come for a pint and a sense of a real working East Cork parish, not for a tour. If the hurlers are out, the village fills; the rest of the time it is fields and the church on the hill and the regulars at the bar. That honesty is the whole point of the place.
