Buíochar · Co. Monaghan
A planned Corry estate village on the Cootehill road, a Wyatt column on one side of it and a Wyatt mausoleum in the forest behind it, and the man who invented Gregg shorthand grown up in the middle of it.
Rockcorry (Irish: Buíochar, from cré buí, "yellow earth") is a small planned village on the R188 between Cootehill and Monaghan town, on the western edge of the county in drumlin country. It was built as a market town and called Newtowncorry by the Corry family - Cornet Walter Corry put up the town and a castle that has since vanished entirely. The Market House on the street dates from 1835, and the Main Street as you walk it now was laid out in the 1840s.
In 1840 the lands were bought into the Dartrey estate by Lord Cremorne, who was made Earl of Dartrey in 1866, and Rockcorry became a Dawson village. The Dawson presence is the thread that runs through everything here. On the Cootehill road stands the Dawson Monument, a neo-classical column designed by James Wyatt around 1808 in memory of Richard Dawson MP, who died in 1807 - the man known as "honest Dick" Dawson, who voted against the Act of Union. Behind the village, the forest hides the other Wyatt structure, and that one is the real reason to come.
The village itself is quiet and small - 416 people at the 2016 census, one pub on the street, a handful of houses and a hall. Do not come expecting a town. Come for the forest, the column, and the particular satisfaction of a place that was carefully built and is now mostly left alone. The thing Rockcorry is proudest of, and barely marks, is that John Robert Gregg - who invented the shorthand that bears his name - grew up here.
