Droichead Chaisleán Loiste · Co. Westmeath
A coaching village the M6 forgot, named for the family that built Belvedere.
Rochfortbridge is one of those places that the road told for two hundred years and then stopped telling. The N6 between Dublin and Galway ran straight through the village street; the coaches changed horses; the pubs filled at lunchtime; the chipper had a queue at half-five. Then in 2006 the M6 opened and the traffic took the bypass and the village went quiet. Pull in off the motorway now and the place feels like a town that has just exhaled.
The name is the story. The Rochforts came to Ireland in the thirteenth century and ended up the biggest landlords in this corner of Westmeath. The same family - specifically Robert Rochfort, the first Earl of Belvedere - built Belvedere House on Lough Ennell and locked his wife in a house on the estate for thirty-one years over a rumoured affair with his brother. That is the famous Rochfort story. The unfamous one is the bridge over the Derry River that carries his family's name on the road sign, and the village that grew up on either side of it.
There is not a great deal here. A long main street, two pubs that work, a restaurant that pulls people in from Mullingar on a Saturday, a Mercy secondary school that is genuinely the largest thing in town. It is a commuter village now - Dublin is an hour, Athlone is half an hour, Mullingar is twenty minutes. Use it as a base for Belvedere House and Tyrrellspass and the Kilbeggan Distillery and you will eat well, sleep cheap, and never sit in traffic.
