Curraghboy
An Currach Búi

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An Currach Búi · Co. Roscommon

A small village in the yellow marsh, fourteen kilometres northwest of Athlone.

Curraghboy is a small village in County Roscommon, fourteen kilometres northwest of Athlone on the R362 regional road. The Irish name An Currach Búi means "the yellow marsh" — the land here was wet ground before it was fields.

The village has the essentials of a small place — a public house, a couple of grocery shops, a Roman Catholic church and a national primary school. The community exists at the scale it does, with the services that scale permits. The road carries traffic between larger centres. The village is where the road passes through.

Population

Approx. 120

Coords

53°29'02"N 8'06'36"W

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Stories & lore.

The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.

R362, the spine

The road

The R362 runs north-south through Roscommon, connecting Athlone to Boyle. Curraghboy sits on this spine. It is not the N4, the motorway that carries traffic at speed. It is the slower route, the one that remembers the villages. For Curraghboy, it is the source of the place's importance — the road is what kept it a village instead of just a name on a map.

The organised life

Handball and school

Like many small villages, Curraghboy has a handball alley — the indoor court where the winter was passed, where skill was measured, where the young showed what they could do. The national school teaches the children of the district. These two things — school and sport — are the institutional spine of a small village. Everything else is family and shop and pub.