Rathaird · Co. Westmeath
A planned village on the N52 with a ruined castle and an unlikely link to Lawrence of Arabia.
Clonmellon is a planned village on the N52, laid out around 1770 by Sir Benjamin Chapman of Killua Castle, two kilometres west. The Chapman family had been granted the land in 1667 as Cromwellian payment, and the town came as part of the long Anglo-Irish project of building a tenant population from scratch. The result is one long, broad, tree-lined main street with the houses lined up along it. Drive through and you'd be in and out in a minute.
The reason to stop is Killua. The castle the Chapmans built was a serious Gothic Revival mansion - round towers, oval drawing room, the lot - and after the family sold up in 1949 it spent half a century as a roofless ruin in a field. A Mexican-Austrian banker bought it in 1999 and put twenty years of his own money into restoring it. It's a private house now, not open to visitors, but the gates and the grounds are visible from the road and the obelisk near the castle is a story in itself.
And then there's the Lawrence thing. Sir Thomas Chapman, the 7th Baronet, lived at Killua with a wife and four daughters. In the mid-1880s he ran off with the governess, Sarah Junner, took her surname (Lawrence), and started a second family in Wales. Their second son, Thomas Edward, grew up to become Lawrence of Arabia. He was illegitimate, the title died with his father, and the connection to a small Westmeath village is the kind of thing you only find out by stopping somewhere most people drive past.
The third local story - the one carved into the obelisk in Killua's grounds - is that Sir Walter Raleigh planted the first potato in Ireland here in 1586. It is, to be clear, almost certainly not true. Youghal in Cork makes the same claim with better paperwork. But the obelisk was built in 1810 by Sir Thomas Chapman to commemorate it, and it has stood there in a Westmeath field for two centuries insisting otherwise. Take it as the local legend it is.
