John Birmingham at Millbrook, 1866
The man who found a new star
John Birmingham (1816-1884) grew up on the Millbrook estate just outside Milltown - a landlord's son who turned polymath, geologist, linguist and poet. On the night of 12 May 1866, walking home from a friend's house, he looked up and saw a star in Corona Borealis that had not been there before. He had discovered T Coronae Borealis, the recurrent nova now nicknamed the Blaze Star. He built his first observatory at Millbrook - a wooden house with a sliding roof - and later bought a telescope from Cooke of York with a Grubb of Dublin lens. His catalogue of red stars won the Royal Irish Academy's Cunningham Medal in 1876, and a crater region on the Moon carries his name. His telescope is on display in the Milltown community museum. The Blaze Star is due to erupt again, visible to the naked eye, any year now - the same star, from the same constellation, that a Galway man caught on a walk home.
Born and died in the village, 1917-1994
M.J. Molloy and the folk theatre
Michael Joseph Molloy was a Milltown man through and through - born in the village and buried in it. He meant to be a priest until tuberculosis put him in hospital for long stretches, and it was there he began writing plays. His best-known work, The King of Friday's Men (1948), played in London and New York and was revived by the Abbey for decades. He drew his material straight from home: through the 1940s and 50s, before electricity reached the area, he cycled within a ten-mile radius of Milltown collecting stories and folklore from rural houses, much of it gathered at the forge of the local blacksmith Michael Silke. Druid's Garry Hynes called the world he made strange and utterly unique, dominated by great baroque characters from the folklore of the west. He has been described as the greatest master of Irish folk theatre since Synge.
Berminghams, O'Flahertys and a bardic school
The castle and the mills
The first record of Milltown is a violent one: in 1589 Sir Murrough O'Flaherty and his men stormed Edward Bermingham's castle, burned half the village and destroyed the grain fields, and still failed to take it. The Berminghams were the local Anglo-Norman family; their corn-and-tuck mill at Lack and O'Grady's mill at Milltown are what gave the village its name. Nearby Kilclooney Castle housed the O hUiginn (O'Higgin) bardic family, hereditary poets who ran a school of poetry through the winter months - twelve years of training to make a file. The parish itself is made up of two medieval civil parishes, Addergoole and Liskeevy.
Four thousand years out of the bog
The Lurgan logboat
In August 1902, turf-cutters in Lurgan Bog near Milltown uncovered an enormous dugout boat carved from a single oak. Radiocarbon-dated to around 2200 BC, the Lurgan logboat is one of the great Bronze Age finds from the Irish midlands and now sits in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. It is not in Milltown - but it came out of the ground here, and it is a reminder that the River Clare country has been worked and travelled for four thousand years.