The founder
St Mel
Mel is remembered as a kinsman of Saint Patrick - the tradition makes him a nephew - who came in Patrick's company and was left as the first bishop of Ardagh in the 430s. His relics were venerated through the Middle Ages and pilgrims travelled to Ardagh to seek his intercession. The monastery that grew around him once covered much of the ground the present village stands on; the surviving piece is a small stone oratory, long known as St Mel's, in the Church of Ireland churchyard. The Catholic diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise still bears his name.
Built to a drawing
The Fetherston estate village
The Fetherstons, a family from the north of England, acquired land at Ardagh in the early 1700s - Thomas Fetherston took around 235 acres in 1703 - and built Ardagh House about 1730. It stayed the family seat into the 1920s. The village as it stands was laid out in the mid-1800s by the architect J. Rawson Carroll, reputedly to Lady Fetherston's notion of a Swiss village: arts-and-crafts cottages, a village green, and a clock tower built in 1862-3 to commemorate Sir George Ralph Fetherston. After the family's time, the Sisters of Mercy ran a convent at Ardagh House. It is a textbook piece of 19th-century landlord planning, and an unusually well-kept one.
She Stoops to Conquer
Goldsmith's mistake
The local legend - and it is a legend, told with a wink - is that the young Oliver Goldsmith, riding through around 1745, mistook Ardagh House for an inn and behaved accordingly, ordering the owners about as if they were staff. The episode is said to have given him the central joke of his comedy She Stoops to Conquer. Ardagh leans on the story, as any village with a famous near-miss would.