The hanged priest, 1766
Father Nicholas Sheehy
Nicholas Sheehy was parish priest of Clogheen from 1750. He was a Catholic clergyman at a time when Catholic clergy were barely tolerated, and he was outspoken - not unusual for the Munster priesthood, but dangerous. The Whiteboys, a secret agrarian movement, were active across south Tipperary in the 1760s, destroying enclosures and threatening land agents. Sheehy was accused by Protestant landowners of sheltering them and of the murder of an informer named John Bridge. He was tried twice - acquitted the first time, convicted the second, on the evidence of witnesses widely believed to have been suborned. He was hanged and beheaded at Clonmel on 15 March 1766. His body was buried at Shanrahan. His head went on a spike on the county gaol. The grave at Shanrahan has never stopped being visited. Most Tipperary people have always known what the trial was.
The ghost in the mountain lake
Bay Lough and Petticoat Loose
Bay Lough, the small corrie lake sitting in the fold of the Knockmealdowns just below the Vee road, has a ghost. She is called Petticoat Loose - a woman, the story says, who drank and danced and played cards with the devil and whose soul now haunts the lake. On calm nights the water is perfectly black. In a wind, the surface breaks into patterns the imagination does not need much help with. The story is old enough that nobody knows where it started, which is usually the sign of a story that has earned its keep.
A road that had to become a poem
The Vee
The R668 from Clogheen over the Knockmealdowns to Lismore is one of the oldest cross-mountain routes in Munster - monks and cattle drove it long before anyone thought to put a surface on it. The V-shape of the pass is a function of geology: two valleys cutting in from opposite sides of the ridge, almost meeting at the top. When the rhododendrons planted on the hillsides above Bay Lough are in flower in late May, the mountain is deep pink from a kilometre off. The rhododendrons are not native - they were introduced in the nineteenth century as ornamental plantings on the Lismore estate lands - and they have spread far beyond what anyone intended. Nobody is complaining about it in May.