Harry Clarke in a bog church, 1907
St Mary's and the converging aisles
St Mary's was finished in 1907 in local yellow brick, with a central tower under a pyramidal roof. The plan is the oddity: a V-shape of converging transepts, built so that men seated in one aisle could not see the women in the other, while both kept a clear line to the altar. The converging aisles were partly filled in around 1950. The two stained-glass windows flanking the chancel came from the Harry Clarke studio in 1936 and show the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart - the kind of jewelled, deep-colour glass the studio was famous for, set down in a village church on the edge of the bog. Buildings of Ireland rates it of regional significance for its architecture, art and social history. It is free to enter and usually open.
Wood that is 4,800 years old
The bog-yew altar
The altar, tabernacle, ambo and chair inside St Mary's were carved from bog yew - timber that grew, fell and was preserved in the surrounding bogs for thousands of years before being dug out and worked. The pieces were made by sculptor Michael Casey and the students of the Celtic Roots Studio at nearby Lemanaghan. Carbon dating put the age of the wood at roughly 4,800 years, meaning the tree was alive before the Egyptian pyramids were built. It is one of the more quietly extraordinary things in any church in the Irish midlands.
Fourteen brickyards on the canal bank
The brick village
Pollagh sits on clay, and once the canal arrived the clay became money. Brickyards opened along both banks from the 1830s; by the end of the nineteenth century fourteen of them were recorded around Pullough, firing brick that the canal boats carried to Dublin. The trade was good enough that the village bucked the national trend - while post-Famine Ireland emptied out, Pollagh's population rose from 267 in 1841 to 301 by 1881. The yards are gone, but the yellow Pollagh brick is still standing in the walls and the church.
Bord na Mona and Lough Boora
From peat to wetland
After brick came turf. Industrial peat extraction worked the bogs south of the village through the twentieth century, with the canal and later the Bord na Mona railway carrying it out. That has mostly stopped now. The cutaway bog at Turraun, once a Bord na Mona works, was among the first to be rehabilitated into a wetland and lake, and it now joins onto Lough Boora Discovery Park - thousands of hectares of reclaimed bog with walking and cycling trails and an outdoor sculpture park. The Turraun route runs right through into Pollagh village.