Ail Finn · Co. Roscommon
An old cathedral town that lost its cathedral, with the oldest working windmill in Ireland on the edge of it and Oliver Goldsmith's schooldays in the ground.
Elphin is a small town in the north of Roscommon, about 715 people, sitting at the meeting of the R368 and R369 in the flat green middle of the country. It was a cathedral town once, the seat of a diocese reaching back to St Patrick, and for centuries that made it more important than its size suggests. Then the cathedral came down and the bishop moved on, and what is left is a quiet Main Street, a Fair Green, and a windmill on the edge of the village doing the work the town is now known for.
The windmill is the thing. Edward Synge, the Bishop of Elphin in the 1720s and 1730s, put up a stone tower mill to grind corn for the locals. It worked until cereal milling stopped paying after the Napoleonic Wars, and it was a roofless ruin by the 1830s. In the 1990s the community took it on - a three-year job, finished and reopened in June 1996 by the actor Gabriel Byrne - and it is now reckoned the oldest windmill in Ireland and the only one of its kind in the west. The thatched cap turns to face the wind and the timber sails go round. There is a small agricultural museum of threshers and winnowers in the yard.
The other history is in the ground and the names. The medieval cathedral east of the village was wrecked in a storm in 1957 and demolished in 1964; the walled site, a prehistoric standing stone and St Patrick's well are still inside the Fair Green. Bishop Hodson's Grammar School on Main Street - the Latin School - schooled Oliver Goldsmith and William Wilde before the bishopric was moved to Kilmore in Cavan in the 1840s and the school faded out. Goldsmith spent his childhood at Ballyoughter just south of here. Percy French was born a few miles away at Cloonyquin.
Do not come to Elphin for a day out on its own merits - it is a half-hour stop, an hour if the windmill is open and you take the museum slowly. Come for it as one point on a Hidden Heartlands run: Rathcroghan, the great royal complex of the Connacht kings, is only a few miles south near Tulsk, and Boyle with its abbey and Lough Key is up the road. Elphin is the kind of place you pass through and are glad you stopped, not the kind you build a holiday around.
