January 1923
The burning
On 9 January 1923, anti-Treaty IRA men arrived at Marlfield House and expelled the occupants. They burned the house systematically - targeting it because John Philip Bagwell, son of historian Richard Bagwell, was a senator in the new Free State. The library his father had spent a lifetime assembling, documents covering Elizabethan and Tudor Ireland, went with the fire. The house was rebuilt by 1925. The papers were not. Bagwell was then kidnapped a second time near Howth twenty days later.
Stephen Moore's reservoir, 1770s
The miller's lake
The dam was built in the early 1770s to power Moore's boulting mill - by 1773-74 the largest grain-processing operation in Ireland, running 15,382 hundredweight that year alone. The lake is artificial: a tributary of the Suir blocked and pooled. When the milling trade died, the lake did not. It became a wildlife sanctuary instead. Swans colonised it. The path around it was worn by walkers rather than millworkers. The reservoir fed by St Patrick's Well still fills it today.
The abbey with no stones left
Inislounaght
In 1148, monks from Mellifont established a Cistercian house at Inislounaght - in Irish, 'inis leamhnachta', island of the fresh milk - on land given by the King of Munster. At its peak, the abbey held 12,836 acres and spawned daughter houses in Cork, Clare, and Waterford. By the Dissolution in 1540, five monks remained and the annual income had fallen to £39. The last abbot surrendered in April of that year. No stone stands today; the fabric was quarried for Clonmel's mills, the local church, and the Main Guard on the town's main street.