Barrowhouse
Teach na Bearú, Co. Laois

A scattered farming parish in the far corner of Laois, two miles from Athy, best known for a 1919 GAA club and a 1921 ambush that cost it two of its own.

Barrowhouse is not a village in the sense of a street with houses on it. It is a townland and a parish in the far south-east corner of Laois, where the county runs down to the River Barrow and the Kildare border. There is no square, no main street, no row of shops. There is a church, a school, a GAA pitch, and farms spread across the townlands of a quiet parish. The nearest town is Athy, about two miles north-west across the river on the Carlow road, and that is where the shops, pubs and beds are.

It is an old corner of country. Barrowhouse was one of the last places in this part of Leinster where Irish was spoken as a living language, dying out only about two hundred years ago. Before that the area was two regions with the tongue-twisting names Fasaghreban and Feranclan-ui-donal. The Weldon family came over around 1600 and held big estates here and in Kildare, building Kilmoroney House out on the Carlow road. Dunbrin Fort, an old ringfort in the parish, was long reputed locally to be a Danish station because coins were turned up there.

What people here actually remember is 1921. On the 16th of May that year, eight young men of the local IRA company set an ambush for a Black and Tan patrol on the Ballylinan road. It went badly. Two of them, William Connors and James Lacey, were shot dead. For a small farming community to lose two of its own in an afternoon was a wound that never quite closed, and the parish still gathers at the roadside cross to mark it.

Come here only if you want the quiet version of Ireland - back roads, good farming land, the Barrow off to the east, and a parish that holds its history close. If you want a pint, a bed or a meal, cross the river to Athy. Barrowhouse is a place to drive through slowly, not a place to base yourself.