Founded 1290
The Augustinian friary
Friars from Clare Priory in Suffolk crossed the sea in 1290 and founded the friary here, on land patronised by Thomas FitzMaurice FitzGerald. They lived quietly for two and a half centuries until Henry VIII's suppression of the monasteries in the late 1530s and 1540s closed them down. The 13th-century chancel and the 60-foot square tower still stand at the back of the modern St. Augustine's Church — the tower was kept on as the belfry, which is why the nineteenth-century parish builders did not knock it down.
Under the east window
McGrath's tomb
A medieval McGrath tomb sits under the east window of the priory. The McGraths were a Gaelic family with land along this coast and a castle at the harbour mouth; the tomb is the family's main physical remainder in the town now. Bring a torch — the inscription is worn.
Born here, 1903
Ernest Walton
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was born in Abbeyside in October 1903, the son of a Methodist minister. He went on to Cambridge, and in 1932, with John Cockcroft, he became one of the first two people to artificially split an atomic nucleus. The 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics followed. He remains the only Irish person to win a Nobel for science. The Greenway's western terminus is named Walton Park in his honour, with a small monument by the path.
How the two halves were stitched
The Devonshire causeway
Until 1816 the only way across the Colligan was a ferry between Roderick's Quay and Abbeyside, or a long detour to a ford miles upstream. The 6th Duke of Devonshire, who owned most of Dungarvan, financed the bridge from 1808 — William Atkinson's original design, with Jesse Hartley brought in after Atkinson's abutments failed — and the work ran 1809–1816 at a cost in the region of £5,000. The single span and the long stone causeway on the Abbeyside side are what made Abbeyside a suburb instead of a separate village.