Baile Hiobaird · Co. Limerick
A one-pub farming village in the Smallcounty lowlands, on the old road from Limerick city to Hospital. You come for the quiet, or you do not come at all.
Herbertstown is small in the way that south Limerick farming villages are small - a single street, a church, a pub, a primary school, a farmers' co-op, and the fields starting again where the houses stop. It sits in the barony of Smallcounty, the lowland limestone country between Bruff and Hospital, about ten kilometres north-east of Bruff on the old road from Limerick city. The River Camogue, a tributary of the Maigue, runs west of the main street, parallel to it, and the strip of land between the water and the road has always been liable to flooding. That is the shape of the place: a street, a river, and good ground for cattle and pigs.
It was a market village once, busier than it looks now. Samuel Lewis's topographical dictionary of 1837 records a constabulary police station here and a series of large pig fairs through the year - January, March, June and November. The Roman Catholic chapel went up in 1836 for £800, and it is still the building that holds the street together. The census of 1841 counted 659 people. By 2016 the village was down to 191. That arithmetic, the long fall from a famine-era market town to a quiet modern village, is the story of half of rural Limerick, and Herbertstown wears it plainly.
Do not come here for sights. There is one pub, the Arch Bar on Main Street, and that is the social centre of the village. The real fame of the place travels under the GAA jersey - Hospital-Herbertstown, the hurling and football club that the village shares with its bigger neighbour up the road. If you are passing through, you are most likely on your way to Lough Gur, the Bronze Age lake and stone-circle landscape a short drive west, or to Hospital with its Crusader history. Herbertstown is the quiet fold of farmland between them. That is not a complaint. It is just what the village is.