A foundation of the year 570
Saint Fraoch's monastery
Saint Fraoch founded a monastery at Cloone in 570, in the early centuries of Irish Christianity when small monastic settlements like this were the centres of learning and prayer across the country. The Catholic parish carried the old name Cloone-Conmaicne. What survives is fragmentary - pieces of a Celtic high cross and stones from the monastery, gathered up and set in the village cemetery on the ground where the foundation stood. The sixth century was hard on the place: the Justinian plague that swept the barony of Mohill is recorded as having badly affected the Cloone area. Stand in the cemetery and you are on a site that has been sacred ground for around fifteen centuries.
A church gone, a tower left standing
St James's bell tower
The bell tower of St James's Church of Ireland is all that remains of a church built by the Board of First Fruits in 1822 - the body that funded Protestant church-building across Ireland in the early nineteenth century. The church itself is gone; the tower was restored in the mid-1990s and a clock installed, manufactured by Samuel Elliott of Dublin. It is the most visible old structure in the village, and a small monument to the layered religious history of a place that has had a church on its ground since the sixth century.
The fields behind the novels
McGahern's landscape
John McGahern (1934-2006) grew up at Aughawillan, a few townlands from Cloone, and the south Leitrim of small fields, lanes and lakeland is the country of his fiction. His novels - Amongst Women, The Dark, and the late masterpiece That They May Face the Rising Sun - do not romanticise rural Ireland; they show its harshness and its beauty without flinching. McGahern is buried at Aughawillan. There is no museum in Cloone, but an interpretive McGahern trail links Mohill, Fenagh, Ballinamore and Aughawillan, the ground he grew up on and wrote from. If you have read the books, the walk around here is the books.
Eleven county titles, and a man who built Quinnsworth
Cloone's GAA and its sons
Cloone's Gaelic football club won eleven Leitrim Senior Football Championships, the most recent in 1980 - a serious record for a parish this small, and a source of long memory at the bar. The village has produced its share of notable people: Pat Quinn, founder of the Quinnsworth supermarket chain that became part of Tesco Ireland, and Shane Kelly, the horse-racing jockey. Fr Peter Conefrey, a Cloone pastor and Irish cultural nationalist, is also part of the parish story.