Built late, beaten by the railway
The Royal Canal
The Royal Canal was the second of Ireland's two great inland navigations, dug in competition with the Grand Canal on the other side of Dublin. It reached Ballynacargy in 1817 and opened all the way to the Shannon at Cloondara in 1817 as well. The harbour here got a canal hotel, commercial stores and a heavy-goods crane — the cast-iron stump of the crane is still there. Then the Midland Great Western Railway laid track along the canal's own banks in the 1850s and the trade vanished within a generation. The canal closed to commercial traffic in 1955, was abandoned, then slowly restored by volunteers from the 1970s on. The Royal Canal Greenway opened along the towpath in 2021 and Ballynacargy is, once again, a stop on a long line of people heading west.
Five arches over the Inny
The Whitworth Aqueduct
Just west of the village the canal has to cross the River Inny, and it does so on a five-arch limestone aqueduct most likely named for Lord Charles Whitworth, who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland between 1813 and 1817 — exactly the years this section was being built. It is one of the more impressive structures on the whole canal and almost nobody stops to look at it. Walk the towpath out from the harbour for fifteen minutes and there it is, water above water, the Inny turning underneath.
A National Famine Way marker
The bronze shoes at the harbour
In 1847 the landlord Major Denis Mahon chartered boats to ship 1,490 of his Strokestown tenants down the Royal Canal to Dublin and on to Liverpool and Quebec. They walked the first stretch from Roscommon to Cloondara in two days, then took canal boats east. The National Famine Way retraces that route as a 165 km walk, marked along its length by thirty pairs of bronze children's shoes cast from a real pair found in the rafters of a ruined cottage. Ballynacargy harbour is one of those markers. Two-thirds of the original 1,490 were children. Stand at the harbour and read the plaque.