Carraig Álainn · Co. Leitrim
A small market village in east Leitrim near the Cavan border, with a famous little theatre, a deep fiddle tradition, and the birthplace of New Orleans' Margaret Haughery a field outside town.
Carrigallen is a small market village in the east of Leitrim, hard against the Cavan border, in the kind of soft lake-and-drumlin country that most people drive straight through on their way to somewhere louder. Carraig Álainn means 'beautiful rock'. Under 500 people live here. There is a Main Street, two churches, a theatre that punches far above the village's weight, and the quiet rhythm of a farming place that has never been on a tourist trail and is not pretending otherwise.
The history runs deep for somewhere so small. There is a portal dolmen at Clooncorrick from the Stone Age, a scatter of Iron Age ringforts in the townlands around the village - the Killahurk fort, two kilometres out, is the best preserved - and the O'Rourke chieftains held this corner of Leitrim from medieval times, with a stronghold on Cherry Island in Garadice Lake, until the Plantation broke their power in the early 1600s. The village you see today was laid out by the Morgan landlords in the 18th century.
Two things give Carrigallen its character. The first is the Corn Mill Theatre - a 170-seat arts centre that came out of a community drama group started in 1963, and which still runs a genuine programme of plays, music and poetry. The second is the music: this is fiddle country, part of a stretch of south-and-east Leitrim where traditional playing has stayed in the community rather than being staged for visitors. Charley Farrelly's bar on Main Street runs a folk club on the first Friday of the month.
Don't come expecting attractions in the brochure sense. Come for a quiet pint, a play if the theatre has one on, the loughs for fishing, and the strange pleasure of standing in a tiny Leitrim village that sent a girl to New Orleans who ended up with a marble statue. Carrigallen is a place to pass a slow evening, not to fill a day.
