A highwayman in the Comeraghs
Crotty the Robber
William Crotty led a gang of Tories and rapparees through Waterford, Tipperary and Kilkenny from about 1738. He shod his horses backwards to confuse pursuers, hid in a cave above what is now Crotty's Lake, and gave away enough of his takings to be remembered as a Robin Hood figure. He was betrayed by a partner's wife, captured after a struggle in which he was shot in the mouth, and hanged in Waterford on 18 March 1742. His head was spiked over the jail gate. His wife Mary is said to have thrown herself from Crotty's Rock above the lake. The Dictionary of Irish Biography reckons she was probably transported instead. Take the version you like; both are true to the place.
A Famine building, reused
The Workhouse
The Kilmacthomas Poor Law Union was created on 7 June 1850, late in the Famine sequence — most workhouses were built in the early 1840s; this one was a backfill. George Wilkinson, the Commissioners' architect, drew it. Construction cost £5,650 plus £955 for fittings. The first admissions were in 1853. It closed in 1919 and limped through the twentieth century as a fever hospital, a creamery store, anything that needed walls. The Greenway gave it a third act in 2017: Coach House Coffee in the front, bike hire in the yard, falconry in the outbuildings, seventy jobs on a six-acre site.
46 km of railway, reborn
The Greenway
The Waterford and Mallow line ran through Kilmacthomas from the 1870s; the eight-arch stone viaduct over the Mahon was finished in 1878. Passenger services ended in 1967. The track was lifted, the bridges held, and for half a century the corridor went to seed. The Waterford Greenway opened in March 2017 along the old bed and the country took to it almost immediately — a quarter of a million users in the first nine months. Kilmacthomas, halfway along, was the village that benefited most. The Workhouse complex was already there, waiting for a use.
Stone the railway left behind
The Mahon viaducts
The Kilmacthomas viaduct is the postcard but it is not the only one. The line crosses the Mahon valley on a sequence of stone arches, the longest of them at Kilmacthomas itself; it runs through the Ballyvoile tunnel a few kilometres west, and over a second viaduct beyond. Walking or cycling the Greenway is the easiest engineering history lesson in Ireland — the Victorian railway builders did not waste a metre of stone, and the route has been left almost exactly as they laid it.