And one stubborn lintel
The Seven Wonders of Fore
Seven kilometres east, in the valley of Fore, locals will list them off in the same order their grandparents did. The monastery built upon the bog. The mill without a race — water made to flow from dry ground. The water that flows uphill. The tree that will not burn. The water in the holy well that will not boil. The anchorite shut up in a stone cell on the slope above the church. And the great lintel over the door of St Féichín's church, which the workmen could not lift, until the saint went home from breakfast, prayed, and set it in place himself. You can stand at most of them in an afternoon. A few of them you have to take on faith.
Founded 630, died of plague 664
St Féichín
Féichín was born up in Sligo and came south to a clearing in the bog at Fore around 630, where he founded the monastery that drew, by the time of his death, around three hundred monks. His feast day is the 14th of January and he died in the great plague that swept Ireland in 664-665. The seven wonders are mostly his miracles, gathered up by later monks who needed the saint to be larger than the man. The Norman de Lacys built a Benedictine priory beside the older site around 1200 and the two ruins now sit a few hundred yards apart, a grey-stone reminder that Fore had two acts.
Lifted from the lake in 1968
The Lough Lene Boat
On the east side of Lough Lene, in 1968, divers raised an oak logboat from the lakebed. Radiocarbon dating put it at the Roman period at the latest — first century AD or earlier — not the Bronze Age, though the local accounts often blur the two. It was paddled, about eight metres long, and is now in the National Museum in Dublin. A second boat came out of the same waters in the same year. They are reminders that the lake was already a place people moved goods and people on, two thousand years ago, when Collinstown was still trees.
Why the village is named for them
The hags
Baile na gCailleach. "Town of the veiled women" — cailleach is the Irish for an old woman, a hag, or a nun, and the word does the work of all three. A small convent stood on an island in Lough Lene at some early date, long enough ago that the records are thin, and the village kept the name when the women were gone. It is the only Irish place name that comes with that particular shrug built in.