Moyvoughly
Maigh Bhachla

The Ireland's Hidden Heartlands
STOP 03 / 03

Maigh Bhachla · Co. Westmeath

A crossroads village north of Moate where the old school and the post office have done most of the talking.

Moyvoughly is a small crossroads village in south-west Westmeath, about five kilometres north of Moate on the back roads toward Ballymore. The Irish name is Maigh Bhachla — the plain of the crozier — which is the kind of name a place keeps when a saint or an abbot is in the soil somewhere. The English spelling has wobbled over the centuries (Moyvaghly turns up on older maps), but the crozier has held. There is no main street. There is a junction, an old school, a post office, a scatter of houses set back behind hedges, and the country either side laid out in long fields.

What you are looking at, when you stand at the crossroads, is a townland that has been a townland for a very long time and a village in only the loosest sense. The civil parish is Ballymore. The Catholic parish is the paired Ballymore and Drumraney — one priest covering both, with the church buildings up the road in the bigger neighbours. The Schools' Collection from the 1930s logged a folklore tradition tied to the present school here and to an older police barracks that used to stand near it. That is most of the village's public record. The rest is the people who live in it, getting on with the week.

Population

Well under 200 across the village and townlands

Walk score

A crossroads, a school, a post office — a minute end to end

Coords

53.4361° N, 7.7392° W

01 / 03

At a glance.

Three things every local will eventually mention. Read these and you've already understood more than most day-trippers do.

01 The name

Maigh Bhachla — the plain of the crozier.

The Irish name carries a saint's staff into the place-name. Logainm gives it as Maigh Bhachla; the older English spelling was Moyvaghly. The crozier is the bachall — an abbot's or bishop's staff — and the midlands have a few of them in the map.

Stories & lore → 02 The crossroads

Five kilometres north of Moate.

The village is a small junction in the country between Moate and Ballymore — a post office, an old school, a few houses, and the road on either side. The townland sits in the civil parish of Ballymore.

About the village → 03 The parish

Ballymore and Drumraney, paired.

The Catholic parish covering Moyvoughly is the paired Ballymore and Drumraney — one priest, two parish centres, a Sunday rhythm shared across the back roads. The nearest churches are at Ballymore and Drumraney themselves.

Parish history →

02 / 03

Stories & lore.

The reason to come back. The things every local will eventually tell you about, usually after the second pint.

The crozier in the name

Maigh Bhachla

Logainm — the State place-names database — gives the village as Maigh Bhachla, the plain of the crozier. The bachall is an abbot's or a bishop's staff, and Irish place-names that carry one usually carry a saint or a foundation with it: a relic, a pilgrim route, a hermitage long since gone back into the field. The specific story behind Moyvoughly's crozier has not survived in any source you can verify in a session at a desk. The name has, which is the way of these things — the saints went, the staves went, the syllables stayed. The older English spelling was Moyvaghly; the current form Moyvoughly is a nineteenth-century smoothing.

A 1930s folklore note

The school and the barracks

The Schools' Collection — the great national folklore-gathering exercise carried out by the Irish Folklore Commission through the national schools in 1937 and 1938 — has a Moyvoughly entry. The pupils logged traditions tied to the present school and to the old police barracks that used to stand near it. The barracks is gone; the school is the thread the village still hangs on. It is a small thing, but for a place this size it is most of the documentary record between the parish registers and the census. The collection sits open on dúchas.ie if you want to go looking.

Getting there.

By car

Moate to Moyvoughly is about 5 km north on the back roads — allow ten minutes. Athlone is around 25 km south-west, half an hour. Mullingar is 35 km north-east, allow an hour on the smaller roads. The N6 motorway runs south of Moate; you exit at Moate and turn north onto local roads.

By bus

There is no scheduled village bus service. The nearest routes run through Moate on the Athlone–Mullingar corridor. In practice, you drive.

By train

No station. Nearest are Moate (no longer a passenger stop), Athlone on the Dublin–Galway line, and Mullingar on the Dublin–Sligo line. From any of them, it is car or taxi the rest of the way.