An Droim · Co. Roscommon
A scattered south-Roscommon parish five kilometres west of Athlone, built on a dolmen older than the pyramids and a priest the Klan killed in Alabama.
Drum is a civil parish in south County Roscommon, about five kilometres west of Athlone in the old barony of Athlone, and it is not a village in the way that word usually means. There is no main street. The 1837 survey counted the parish at 16,159 acres of mostly poor tillage and bog and just under five thousand souls; the modern parish is a few hundred people scattered across forty-odd townlands, with the small hamlet of Cornafulla as its sister settlement. What holds it together is the church, the graveyard, the GAA club and a heritage group that has refused to let the place forget itself.
And there is a great deal to forget, or rather to remember. The Meehambee Dolmen stands in light woodland in the townland of Mihanboy, a Neolithic portal tomb from around 3500 BC - older than the pyramids, older than anything you will read about in the guidebooks. The Irish name means the yellow meadow; the 1930s folklore collectors recorded it as Leabaidh Eirn, Eirn's bed. A monastic site followed thousands of years later, the foundation traditionally credited to a 5th-century abbot, and the present St Brigid's Church was built in 1873 on that long thread of worship.
The strangest story Drum carries left the parish entirely. Father James Coyle was born here in 1873, the year the church went up. He emigrated, became a priest, and ended up as pastor of St Paul's in Birmingham, Alabama. In August 1921 he married a Catholic convert, Ruth Stephenson, to a Puerto Rican Catholic, Pedro Gussman. Ruth's father, a Methodist minister and Klan member, shot Coyle dead on the rectory porch that same evening. The killer was acquitted. A Roscommon parish boy became a martyr in the American South, and the case is still studied there a century on.
Come to Drum for the stone and the story, not for the comforts. The amenities are in Athlone, five minutes east on the back roads. The dolmen is the reason to turn off the M6, and it is reason enough.