1904, the Maher brothers and Peter Nea
A hurling parish in a football county
Raharney Rovers existed first as a football club - first mentioned in 1886, one of the early clubs in Westmeath. It went quiet, then came back in 1904 as a hurling club. The story the club tells of itself is that two stonemason brothers, Tom and Joe Maher, were working on the renovation of St Brigid's Church in the village and got friendly with a local man, Peter Nea. The three of them shared an interest in the GAA and revived the Rovers as hurlers. The first county senior hurling title came in 1913, beating Crooketwood 3-4 to 1-0. Westmeath has stayed a footballing county since. Raharney has stayed the parish that hurls.
Westmeath Senior Hurling Championship titles
Fifteen and counting
1913, 1914, 1919, 1967, 1973, 1984, 1992, 1994, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2021, 2023. Fifteen Westmeath Senior Hurling Championships, the last in October 2023. In a county where the senior hurling championship is contested by a small handful of clubs, Raharney is the bench-mark. The club today runs hurling and camogie together, almost exclusively concerned with the small ball, and the camogie side has its own collection of county finals.
A ringfort, then a ford, then a village
Ráth Fhearna
The name is straightforward Irish - Ráth Fhearna, read locally as the ringfort of the sloes or of an early figure named Fearna. The ringfort itself is a recorded National Monument (number 572) above the river. The triple-arched bridge over the Deel in the middle of the village was renovated in 1848 under a famine relief scheme; the form of the two western arches suggests Grand Jury work from around 1800, tied into a third heavily rusticated arch by the Board of Works in the mid-1800s. The roads into the village all slope down toward the river - a sign that before the bridge there was a ford, and before the ford there was probably the ráth above it. The village reached its peak in the early 1800s with around forty-five houses and a corn and saw mill that worked into the 1940s. A settlement folded around a crossing point, the way a lot of Irish villages did, and then a parish that found a sport.
An old graveyard on the riverbank
Kilcolumb
On a low hill by the Deel outside the village sits Kilcolumb, an unused graveyard on the site of an old church. There is little left above ground and no signage to speak of - the kind of quiet, half-forgotten ecclesiastical site that dots this part of the midlands. Worth a look only if you are the sort who stops at every old burial ground, but it is the oldest thread in the parish and it is real.