28 April 1916, Rath Cross
The Battle of Ashbourne
On the Friday of Easter week, Thomas Ashe and his second in command Richard Mulcahy led around fifty men of the 5th (Fingal) Battalion of the Dublin Brigade toward Batterstown, intending to cut the railway. At Rath Cross Roads north of Ashbourne they attacked the RIC barracks. A column of police arrived by car as reinforcements, and the fight spread out along the ditches and drains of the crossroads for roughly five hours. The Volunteers, dispersed and fighting from cover rather than holding a fixed building, eventually forced both the barracks garrison and the relief column to surrender. It was the only clear-cut Volunteer victory of the Rising, and the only action where the Crown forces were beaten in the open. The mobile tactics became a template for the War of Independence. A memorial at Rath Cross, unveiled by President Seán T. O'Kelly in 1959 and expanded for the 2016 centenary, marks the ground.
The schoolmaster commander
Thomas Ashe
Thomas Ashe was born in Lispole, Co. Kerry, in 1885 and became principal of Corduff National School in Lusk, north County Dublin, in 1908. A member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and active in the Gaelic League, he commanded the Fingal Battalion at Ashbourne, the one engagement of 1916 that went unambiguously the Volunteers' way. He was court-martialled and sentenced to death after the Rising; the sentence was commuted and he was released in the 1917 amnesty. Re-arrested that year, he went on hunger strike in Mountjoy and died on 25 September 1917 after a botched force-feeding. His funeral was an enormous public event and a turning point for republican sympathy.
Frederick Bourne, c. 1820
A town named to order
Ashbourne is one of the few Irish towns you can date to a single decision. The medieval settlement here was Killegland - Cill Dhéagláin, the church of Déaglán - and the old graveyard still carries the early-Christian name. But the town itself was built from about 1820 when Frederick Bourne, who made his money in coaching and transport, bought the land along the main Dublin-to-the-north road and laid out an inn, a hotel and a parade of businesses to serve the traffic. He named it from ash, his favourite tree, and Bourne, himself. The Church of the Immaculate Conception followed in the 1880s. Everything else is the last forty years of Dublin spilling north.