Cionn Átha Gad · Co. Westmeath
The fork in the road. Where Galway and Sligo go their separate ways.
Kinnegad is a junction town. That is the whole shape of it. An hour west of Dublin the motorway splits - M4 left for Galway, M6 right for Sligo - and the town is built into the angle of the fork. It has always been a junction town. Stagecoach services to Kinnegad were running from Dublin in 1737, when the trip cost five and fivepence and took the better part of a day. By the early 1800s the coaches were what kept the place fed.
Then the railways came and the coaches stopped, and Kinnegad spent most of the twentieth century as a quiet village on a busy road. Population sat under six hundred for a hundred years. Then the road got busier, the country got richer, the commuter belt swelled, and between 1996 and 2016 the population went from 517 to 2,745 - a five-fold jump. Most of the houses you see were built in those twenty years. The 2022 census found Kinnegad had the youngest average age of any town its size in Ireland: 34.1 years. A town of young families on a motorway slip road.
What it is not is a place to spend a weekend. Nothing scenic. No cathedral, no castle on a hill, no festival worth a detour. The Royal Canal feeder slips past the south of the town with no path worth walking. What there is, is a Main Street that survived being bypassed, two pubs that do a proper carvery, and a roadside hotel-and-bar that keeps lights on at midnight. If you are stopping for an hour between Dublin and Galway, you could do worse. If you are looking for Westmeath proper, drive on to Mullingar or Athlone.
