A 12th-century reliquary, still venerated
St Manchan's Shrine
In the Catholic church at Boher, a few kilometres from Ballycumber, sits one of the great treasures of medieval Ireland: St Manchan's Shrine. It is a large house-shaped reliquary, about sixty centimetres wide, built around a yew core, raised on four cast-bronze feet and clad in silver plates with gilt and copper-alloy figures and big ornamental bosses. It was made in the 12th century to hold the relics of Manchan of Lemanaghan, who died in the yellow plague of 664. Remarkably it is not in a museum - it is kept in the parish church and is still venerated there, his feast day falling on 24 January. If you only do one thing in this parish, this is it.
St Manchan's island monastery in the bog
Lemanaghan
Manchan was a scholar who left Clonmacnoise in the 7th century and founded a monastery at Tuaim nEirc - an island of dry ground in the surrounding bog, now called Lemanaghan, a short drive west of Ballycumber. The ruins are real: a main church linked by an old roadway to a smaller one, a holy well, bullaun stones and a scatter of early grave slabs. Peat-cutting in the bogs around it has uncovered toghers, the timber trackways that pilgrims and travellers laid down to cross the wet ground to reach the place. It is quiet, half-forgotten and properly old.
A buttressed garden tower above the Brosna
The Ballycumber Folly
On rising ground in the old Ballycumber House demesne, overlooking the river, stands an odd circular folly of rubble sandstone - six flying buttresses, four tall arched windows, a fireplace inside. It is reckoned to be a relatively early example of an ornamental garden building in Ireland, dated loosely to around 1830 and possibly remodelled from something a century older. The Irish Georgian Society put money toward its repair in 2019. Ballycumber House itself was built as a castle in 1627 and turned into a dwelling in 1748. The folly stands on private demesne land, so admire it from a respectful distance rather than expecting a turnstile.
Ireland's first airman had a foot here
Crosbie of Ballycumber
Richard Crosbie (1755-1824) was the first Irishman to make a manned flight - up in a hydrogen balloon over Dublin in January 1785, just over a year after the Montgolfiers got off the ground in France. His Dublin ascent is well commemorated, but the Ballycumber thread is real too: his wife's family, the Armstrongs, held Twickenham House just northwest of the village, and by 1788 a deed describes him plainly as "Richard Crosbie formerly of the City of Dublin, now of Ballycumber in the Kings County, Esquire." The flight was Dublin's; the man, for a while, was the parish's.