Ráth Iomgháin · Co. Kildare
A canal town on the bog, with a hill full of legend behind it.
Rathangan is a canal town on the Barrow Line in west Kildare, sitting at the edge of the Bog of Allen with the Slate River coming through and the Hill of Allen visible on clear days to the north-east. The name says it plainly: Ráth Iomgháin — the fort of Iomghán — and the ringfort it refers to has sat northwest of the town since around 600 AD, when the Uí Failge kings built it as a seat of power where bog resources met river crossings. The town grew later, around the canal, and the Georgian townhouses along the water are evidence of that second founding.
The Grand Canal's Barrow Line reached here in the late eighteenth century and changed the town's geometry entirely. Suddenly this was a point on a route — Dublin to the Barrow, the Barrow to Waterford and the sea. The harbour filled with barges carrying Guinness porter westward and turf and grain east. The last cargo barge passed through in 1960. What remains is one of the better-preserved stretches of the Barrow Way: flat, quiet, and long enough to actually get somewhere on.
Bord na Móna occupied the bogland around Rathangan for most of the twentieth century. At the operation's peak, narrow-gauge railway lines spread across the peatland like a diagram of capillaries. The extraction has been wound down — a combination of EU environmental commitments and a court ruling that forced the semi-state body to stop — and the bogs around Umeras, a few kilometres out, are now being discussed as a peatlands park. Rewilding is a slower thing than cutting was. The land still has the flat, engineered look of former industrial ground.
The town itself is smaller than the history suggests it should be. A handful of pubs, a good Indian restaurant, a canal harbour, and the fort-mound to the northwest. The Hill of Allen sits behind everything. Fionn and the Fianna trained on the surrounding flatlands, according to the myths — reasonable enough, given how much space there is. A nineteenth-century tower stands on the summit now, built as a folly by a local landlord whose workmen dug up a large coffin during construction and decided it was Fionn's. They reburied it. The quarrying company that now owns most of the hill has been less reverent.