Founded 1182, burned twice, still standing
Kilcooley Abbey
Donal Mór O'Brien, King of Thomond, granted land here to the Cistercians in 1182. The monks came from Jerpoint, the great Cistercian house across the Kilkenny border. They built an abbey dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St Benedict. In 1418 it was burned in a raid. In 1445 it was burned again, almost completely destroyed. The abbot Philip O'Mulwanayn rebuilt it in the years that followed - the stonework you can see today is largely his work. The dissolution came in 1540. The estate passed through several owners: Ormonde, a Norfolk judge named Jerome Alexander, then the Barker family through his daughter's marriage. The Barkers held Kilcooley for nearly two centuries. Sir William Barker - the one who put the tower on the ridge - was the last of the direct line; he died in 1818, the year after he built it.
A folly built for a battle two years past
The Wellington Tower
In 1817, Sir William Barker commissioned a monument on the crag above Grange to mark Wellington's victory at Waterloo. The structure is an architectural trick - from the south and west it reads as a square defensive tower with pointed arch niches and Greek cross loops. From the north and east there is almost nothing behind the facade. It was always meant to be looked at from below. The estate forestry planted in the mid-twentieth century grew up around it and hid it for decades. By the time Coillte clear-felled in the early 1990s, most people had forgotten it was there. The dedication stone on the west face remained legible. A modern steel spiral staircase was installed beside it. You can now stand at the top and see from the Kilcooley demesne all the way west to the Devil's Bit mountain.
An Ghráinseach - the grange of the monks
The name
The village is named for what it was: a grange, an out-farm attached to a monastic estate. The Cistercians at Kilcooley ran Grange as a working farm - storing grain, keeping livestock, supplying the abbey. This was standard practice for Cistercian houses across medieval Ireland and Europe. When the monastery was dissolved in 1540 the farm went with the estate, but the name stayed. It is still listed in the barony of Slieveardagh, in the civil parish of Kilcooly, on the Tipperary side of the hills.