William A. Scott, early 1920s
St Michael's Church
St Michael's was built in the early 1920s to a design by William A. Scott, one of the more interesting Irish architects of his generation and the man who designed St Patrick's Basilica on Lough Derg. Work was completed under the supervision of R.M. Butler of University College Dublin. It is a freestanding cruciform church in the Early English Gothic style - a six-bay nave with transepts north and south, a two-bay chancel to the east, and a three-stage belfry at the centre. The walls are snecked rock-faced limestone with rusticated quoins; inside there are limestone pillars, pointed arches, an open timber-truss ceiling, a gallery and stained glass. The national survey calls the belfry, the buttresses and the masonry the work of skilled craftsmen, and it is right. For a parish of a couple of hundred souls it is a remarkably ambitious piece of building.
A site used since around 1800
The older church and graveyard
The church does not stand on new ground. The site contains the remnants of an earlier graveyard and an earlier Catholic chapel dating to around 1800, the older cemetery wrapped around where the previous church stood. A newer cemetery opened on the site in 1963. Worship has gone on in this one spot for well over two centuries, which is the real continuity here - the present church is just the third act.
County training base, opened 2008
Monaghan's Centre of Excellence at Cloghan
In the townland of Cloghan, just off the N2 between Castleblayney and Clontibret, sits the Monaghan GAA Centre of Excellence - the county board's training and development base. It opened in 2008 with five floodlit pitches, was extended in 2013 with more dressing rooms, meeting rooms and offices, and carries the Entekra naming rights. Every code uses it: men's and ladies' football, hurling, camogie, rounders. It is not a tourist site, but it is the engine room of Monaghan football, and for a small Ulster county that has spent the last decade competing well above its size, that is no small thing.
War of Independence
The ambush of May 1921
This was active ground during the War of Independence. The local IRA company belonged to the 2nd Monaghan Brigade of the 5th Northern Division. On 25 May 1921 a member of the Black and Tans was wounded in an ambush near here in which the unit seized a number of weapons. The border country of south Monaghan saw a good deal of this in 1920 and 1921 - quiet drumlin lanes that were anything but quiet at the time.
Ringforts, lime kilns, a megalith
Older still
People were here long before the parish. The townlands of Annyalla and Cloghan hold the remains of ringforts, lime kilns and at least one megalithic monument - the usual quiet archaeology of the Monaghan drumlins, mostly grass-covered banks and lumps in fields that you would walk past without a second look. Nothing is signposted or set up for visitors, but it is there in the landscape if you know to read it.