Rearcross
Crois an Réaráin, Co. Tipperary

A crossroads in the Slieve Felim hills where the GAA club carries more history than the map does.

Rearcross is a crossroads in the Slieve Felim hills - a handful of houses, a church, a community hall, and a GAA club whose name is bigger than the village. The R503 passes through heading northwest from Newport toward the Limerick border at Murroe. There is no town centre to speak of; the cross itself is the centre, and the hills fold in on all sides.

What Rearcross has, in lieu of attractions, is geography and history. The geography is the Slieve Felim range: rough, green, and consistent - the kind of hills that don't announce themselves but reward anyone who walks into them. The history is Seán Treacy. He was born in the parish of Kilcommon in 1895, which puts his origin within the three-parish area - Hollyford, Kilcommon, Rearcross - that the local GAA club now carries his name across. He was one of the three men who fired the opening shots of the War of Independence at Soloheadbeg in January 1919. He died on Talbot Street in Dublin in October 1920, twenty-five years old.

The village has honest scarcity. There is no hotel, no restaurant, no marked visitor trail with a car park and an information board. The Slieve Felim Way long-distance route passes through the wider area, and the hills above the village are walkable on OS Sheet 59 by anyone who doesn't mind reading a map. The crossroads itself is the kind of place you pass through and then find yourself thinking about later - the quiet, the elevation, the sense that the hill country goes on considerably further than you expected.