The year 900
Sean's Bar
Sean's Bar in Athlone has held a Guinness World Record certificate as the oldest pub in Ireland since 2004, with a claimed founding of around 900 AD by an innkeeper called Luain Mac Luighdeach. The Áth Luain — Luain's ford — is where the town gets its name. When Sean Fitzsimons rebuilt the place in 1970 he found wattle-and-wicker walls and a clutch of mid-1600s coins, which the National Museum took. Architectural historians note the present building is more like 17th-century. The pub's older than that, the building isn't. Both can be true.
Twelve thousand cannonballs
The 1691 Siege
In June 1691 the Williamite general Godert de Ginkell turned his guns on Athlone and fired roughly 12,000 cannonballs over ten days — the heaviest bombardment in Irish history. The Jacobite garrison held the west bank until the 30th of June, when the Williamites waded the river at low water, took the bridge, and broke the line. About 1,500 men died. Limerick fell three months later and the war ended. The remains of the Elizabethan bridge are still in the riverbed if you know where to look.
The world tenor
John McCormack
Count John McCormack was born in Athlone on the 14th of June 1884, the son of two Scottish-born millworkers at the Athlone Woollen Mills. He sang in St Peter's church choir, won the gold medal at the Feis Ceoil in 1903, made his Covent Garden debut at 23, and could hold a phrase for 64 notes on one breath. By the 1920s he was the most famous tenor in the world. There's a statue of him outside the Civic Centre, unveiled in 2014, and a square in his name.
The deserted village
Goldsmith country
Ten kilometres north of Athlone, around Glasson and Lissoy, is the rural parish where Oliver Goldsmith grew up. His father was rector of Kilkenny West from 1730. The poem he wrote in London thirty years later — 'The Deserted Village,' the one about Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain — is widely thought to be about this stretch of road. The local pubs all claim it. They might all be right.