An Currach Buí · Co. Roscommon
A small village in the yellow marsh, fourteen kilometres northwest of Athlone, with one pub, a folk museum of 7,500 things, and one of the great club football teams in the country.
Curraghboy is a small village in south County Roscommon, fourteen kilometres northwest of Athlone on the R362 regional road. The Irish name An Currach Buí means "the yellow marsh" - the land here was wet ground before it was drained into fields. It sits in the civil parish of Cam, barony of Athlone, in the flat middle of the country that the tourist board now calls Ireland's Hidden Heartlands.
It has the essentials of a small place and not much more: one public house, two grocery shops, St Brigid's Roman Catholic church, a national school, and an indoor handball alley. That is the village. The road carries traffic between Athlone and the smaller centres to the north, and Curraghboy is where the road slows down to pass through.
Two things give it more weight than its size suggests. The Derryglad Folk and Heritage Museum, built up over decades by the Finneran family, holds well over 7,500 objects of Irish rural life and is a genuine reason to stop. And the parish feeds St Brigid's GAA, the club from Kiltoom, Curraghboy and Brideswell that won the All-Ireland club football title in 2013 - a remarkable thing for a place this small to have done.
Do not come expecting a destination. Come if you are driving the R362, want a proper look at how rural Ireland actually lived, and do not mind that the pub is currently a prefab. The folk museum is the morning. The pint is the afternoon. That is Curraghboy, and it is honest about it.
