Four thousand acres and a waterway
Henry Grattan's canal
Henry Grattan, the Patriot orator who won legislative independence for the Irish Parliament in 1782, was voted £50,000 by that same parliament as a gift. He spent much of it on land - nearly four thousand acres in the Vicarstown area, bought from the Cosby family of Stradbally. When the Barrow Line of the Grand Canal was driven south from Lowtown to Athy in the early 1790s, its route ran straight through the Moyanna estate he had acquired. The village grew up at the crossing point. The stone canal stores on the bank are what is left of the working waterway that gave the place its reason to be.
Erected by Mrs Grattan Bellew, 1868
The school the landlord built
Vicarstown National School is a long single-storey building dated 1868 and designed by the architect Charles Geoghegan. The stone over the door spells out who paid for it: it records that the male and female national schools were erected by Mrs Grattan Bellew for the education of the children of her tenants. It is a small, telling piece of nineteenth-century estate paternalism set down in a canal village - the Grattan name still on the stone, a century after Henry Grattan bought the land.
Grand Canal Bank, Saturdays at 9:30
The only parkrun in Laois
For a village this size to hold the single parkrun in the entire county is a small point of pride. The free weekly five-kilometre run sets off along the Grand Canal bank every Saturday morning - flat, traffic-free, water on one side. There is a junior version too. On a still morning it is the busiest the towpath gets all week, and then it empties again and the canal goes back to itself.