The bridge between two musics
Turlough O'Carolan
Born near Nobber in 1670 and blinded by smallpox around eighteen, O'Carolan was given a harp, a horse and some money by his patron Mrs MacDermott Roe to set him up as an itinerant harper. What followed was forty years of travelling - to the great houses and the courts of the surviving Irish gentry across the island. He married melodies that carried the loneliness of the old Irish style to the shape and grace of European classical form, and he had a rare knack for it. When he died in 1738 about 220 of his tunes were in the world. Most are still played. A statue was erected to him in the village in 2002.
A monastery that left only stones
The high crosses of St John
In St John's Old Cemetery in the village stands a group of high and Latin crosses - nine of them, by the local count, some possibly dating to the tenth century. They were only properly recognised in this century, and they point to an early Christian monastic settlement on the site that otherwise vanished without record. The medieval parish church that came later survives now only as a bell tower in the same graveyard. The Church of Ireland building beside it, put up in 1771, has been renamed the George Eogan Cultural and Heritage Centre after the Nobber-born archaeologist who excavated Knowth - opened by President Michael D. Higgins in 2016.
Norman frontier, late 12th century
An Obair - the work
The Normans were the first people known to settle here. Under Hugh de Lacy, lord of Meath after 1172, the Barony of Morgallion was granted to Gilbert de Angulo, who raised a motte-and-bailey fort - the earthwork that gives the village its Irish name, An Obair, 'the work'. Nobber sat on the road from the ports of Drogheda and Dundalk into the midlands, and by the fifteenth century King Henry VI rated it strategically important to holding the region. The medieval street pattern of the village still carries the shape of that frontier settlement.