Riverstick farm, 1883 to the Curragh, 1923
Denny Barry, the hunger striker
Denis Barry was born into a farming family at Riverstick in 1883. He was a Gaelic Leaguer and a hurler before he was a soldier, then a commandant in the Cork No. 1 Brigade of the IRA. He took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War, was interned at Newbridge in 1922 without charge, and joined the mass hunger strike of 1923. He died on 20 November 1923, after 35 days, in the Curragh camp hospital. What made his death notorious was what followed: Daniel Cohalan, the Bishop of Cork, forbade the Catholic churches to open their doors to his coffin - a pointed contrast to the funeral the same bishop had given the hunger striker Terence MacSwiney three years earlier. The village put up a memorial stone to Barry in 1966 and still lays a wreath for him each November.
A monastery in the Martyrology of Tallaght
Cullen of the scholars
Leave the village toward Ballymartle and you enter the old parish of Cullen, Cuilinn, an early Christian monastic site important enough to be one of the few Cork places named in the Martyrology of Tallaght, compiled around 800 AD. It was called Cullen na Cléarach, Cullen of the scholars or clerics, and the feast of its saint, Flann Fionn, falls on 14 January. The abbacy stayed in the Barry-óg family for generations. The Taxation of Pope Nicholas valued the church at five marks in 1291. By 1700 it was a ruin standing on a mound the locals called the Moat. South of it, on what became O'Connell's farm, stood a small Norman castle of the manor of Glyn, held by the de Cogans and later by Richard Roche of Kinsale, who lost it after the Confederate wars; it was gone by 1659. Twenty feet of its wall was still standing into the early 1900s.