c. 1730, turning again since 1996
Bishop Synge's windmill
Edward Synge, Church of Ireland Bishop of Elphin, built the stone tower mill around 1730 to grind corn and mill flax for the people of the area. It is a circular three-stage tower with a thatched cap that rotates to turn the sails into the wind - a design more common in eastern England than in the Irish midlands, which is part of what makes it rare. Milling cereal stopped paying after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, and the mill was already a ruin by the 1830s. It sat that way for over a century and a half. A community scheme rebuilt it over three years, reopening it in June 1996 with Gabriel Byrne doing the honours. It is now the oldest windmill in Ireland and the only working one of its type in the west, run as a not-for-profit by the village. An agricultural museum of old harvest machinery sits in the yard.
St Patrick to Kilmore
The diocese that left
Elphin claims one of the oldest church origins in Connacht. Tradition holds that St Patrick founded the first church here and ordained Asicus as the first bishop; Asicus became the patron saint of the place. The medieval cathedral, St Mary's, stood east of the town and is reckoned to date from around 1200. The Church of Ireland rebuilt it in the 18th century, but a storm on the 4th of February 1957 wrecked it and it was demolished in 1964. The site is walled and holds a prehistoric standing stone and a holy well known as St Patrick's well, all inside the Fair Green at the entrance. The bishopric itself was united with Kilmore and Ardagh and the seat moved to Kilmore in County Cavan in the 1840s. The town has been living off the memory ever since.
Bishop Hodson's Grammar School
Goldsmith, Wilde and the Latin School
The diocesan school on Main Street, also called the Latin School, taught the writer Oliver Goldsmith - author of "She Stoops to Conquer" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" - who spent his childhood at Ballyoughter just south of Elphin and may have been born at his mother's family home, Smith Hill, outside the village. Sir William Wilde, the eye surgeon and father of Oscar Wilde, was another pupil. The building, properly Bishop Hodson's Grammar School, is a protected structure and has been earmarked for use as a heritage centre. The school went into decline when the bishopric moved to Kilmore in the 1860s. For a clever boy in the eighteenth-century midlands, this small school was the door out.
Shankhill, two Victoria Crosses
The men on the cross
Elphin sent out a remarkable number of soldiers. The monument at Shankhill Cross, three over-life-size figures put up in 1963, marks the military connection. Two men with Elphin ties won the Victoria Cross: Luke O'Connor, born nearby in 1831, was the first man awarded the VC at the Battle of the Alma in the Crimea, and Patrick Roddy was another recipient. It is the sort of thing that does not advertise itself - a stone group at a crossroads in a small town - but it is real and worth the two minutes to read.