Béal Átha Fearnáin · Co. Roscommon
The village where Ireland's last great harper lived out his days. Turlough O'Carolan is buried up the road, and they have not stopped playing for him since.
Ballyfarnan is a small village in the far north of Roscommon, on the R284 a mile or two short of the Sligo border, built on the River Feorish at the foot of Arigna mountain. The Irish is Béal Átha Fearnáin, the ford-mouth of the alders. A church, a primary school, a GAA pitch, a garage with a shop, and two pubs - one of them not open full-time. Fewer than two hundred people. This is not a destination, and it does not pretend to be one.
What it has is O'Carolan. Turlough O'Carolan, the blind harper who is as close as Ireland has to a national composer, was brought here as a young man when his family came to work for the MacDermott Roes of Alderford House around 1684. He had lost his sight to smallpox; Mrs MacDermott Roe set him up with a harp and a guide and a horse, and he spent the next fifty years travelling the big houses of Connacht and Ulster, composing the planxties and airs that musicians still play. He came back here to die in 1738, in the house where he had been taken in.
He is buried two miles up the road at Kilronan, in the MacDermott Roe vault under the gable of a ruined church that goes back, in its first form, to the eighth century and St Lasair. The harp festival that commemorates him runs out of Keadue, the next village over, every August bank holiday weekend and has done since 1978. The rest of the year Ballyfarnan is quiet, and honest about it.
If you come, come for the man and the landscape - the river, the mountain, the well, the grave - not for a night out. The big house on the hill, Kilronan Castle, is a hotel now and the only proper bed for miles. Everything else here is small and worth slowing down for.