Tang
An Teanga

The Ireland's Hidden Heartlands
STOP 04 / 04

An Teanga · Co. Westmeath

A crossroads, a parish church, and the pub that lent its name to a Goldsmith play.

Tang is a small village in west Westmeath, set on the back roads between Athlone and Ballymahon. There is a parish church, a national school, a hall, a handful of houses, and the country either side is farms and bog. By any honest measure it is well under two hundred people. You can walk the village in five minutes and miss it in a car if you blink at the wrong moment.

What Tang has, that most parishes this size do not, is a writer. Oliver Goldsmith — author of "The Deserted Village", "She Stoops to Conquer" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" — grew up a mile up the road at Lissoy parsonage, where his father was rector of Kilkenny West from 1730 until 1747. The parsonage is a ruin now. The school house where he learned his letters is a roofless gable. The Busy Mill of his poem is gone. What remains is the country he wrote about, which still looks broadly like itself, and the names — Lissoy, Auburn, the Three Jolly Pigeons — which have been carrying the place around the English-speaking world for two and a half centuries.

Don't come for a checklist. Come for an afternoon. The audio trail launched in late 2025 is the easy way in: park at the Three Jolly Pigeons, walk a loop past the parsonage and the school house, hear a stanza of "The Deserted Village" in the right field. Then sit in the pub. The McCormacks have been pouring there since 1931, the millstone at the door is the millstone from Goldsmith's poem, and the rest is a quiet country pint in a country place that has earned the right to be quiet.

Population

Well under 200 in the village core

Walk score

A church, a school, a pub up the road — five minutes end to end

Coords

53.4844° N, 7.8500° W

01 / 04

At a glance.

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

01 Goldsmith Country

Lissoy is a mile up the road.

Oliver Goldsmith grew up at Lissoy parsonage between Tang and Ballymahon from 1730 until his father's death in 1747. The ruined parsonage, the school house and the Busy Mill site are all on the Goldsmith Country audio trail.

Stories & lore → 02 The Three Jolly Pigeons

The pub from "She Stoops to Conquer".

The pub of that name a short walk south of the village takes its name from the inn in Goldsmith's 1773 play. The McCormack family have run it since 1931. Stones from Lissoy parsonage and the Busy Mill are built into the entrance.

The pub → 03 The parish

Drumraney and Tang.

Tang is the smaller half of the Catholic parish of Drumraney and Tang in the Diocese of Meath — one priest, two churches, a familiar midlands arrangement. The village itself is a crossroads with a church, a school and a few houses set back behind hedges.

Onward stops →

02 / 04

The pubs.

None of these are themed Irish pubs, because they don't need to be. A few that earn the trip:

The Three Jolly Pigeons

Locals, traditional music, literary pilgrims

Country pub, McCormack family since 1931

Named for the inn in Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer" (1773). The current building is a 19th-century one — a NIAH-listed country pub at The Pigeons townland, a short drive south of Tang village. Local tradition has it that stones from the demolished Busy Mill (the mill in "The Deserted Village") and fireplace stones from Lissoy parsonage are built into the entrance. Trad sessions and a turf fire in winter. Closes at sensible country-pub hours.

03 / 04

Stories & lore.

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

1730–1747

The Goldsmith family at Lissoy

Oliver Goldsmith was born in 1728, almost certainly at Pallas in south Longford where his father Charles was curate of Forgney. When Oliver was about two, his father was appointed rector of the parish of Kilkenny West, and the family moved to the parsonage at Lissoy, between Tang and Ballymahon. Goldsmith lived there until his father's death in 1747, when he was nineteen. He went on to Trinity College Dublin, then Edinburgh, then London, and never came back to Lissoy except in writing. The parsonage burned in the 19th century and stands as a ruin today. The school house where the village master taught him is a few hundred yards away, also a ruin. Both are stops on the Goldsmith Country audio trail.

The deserted village

"Sweet Auburn"

"The Deserted Village" was published in 1770. It opens "Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain, / Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain" and goes on to mourn the enclosure of common land and the emptying of the countryside. Local tradition — held strongly around Tang and Ballymahon, less strongly by Goldsmith scholars — identifies Auburn with Lissoy. The poem is in part a composite, drawing on rural England as much as rural Ireland; Goldsmith himself was vague about it. But the Busy Mill, the parson's house, the village master's school and the alehouse with "the chest contrived a double debt to pay, / A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day" all map convincingly onto Lissoy as he would have remembered it. The town of Auburn, Alabama, and Auburn University, take their name from the same poem. The line travels.

A pub, a play, and a millstone

The Three Jolly Pigeons

In "She Stoops to Conquer" (1773) the rakish Tony Lumpkin sings a drinking song in a country alehouse called the Three Jolly Pigeons. Goldsmith almost certainly took the name from a real inn in his home parish. The current Three Jolly Pigeons, in the townland of The Pigeons a short way south of Tang, is a 19th-century building — the original Goldsmith-era inn was a little further south, at Clonghannagarragh, and is gone. What survives is the name, the pub, and a small archaeology of Goldsmith stones built into the present building: a millstone said to be from the Busy Mill, fireplace stones said to be from Lissoy parsonage, salvaged when the older buildings came down around 1860. The McCormack family bought the pub in 1931 and have run it ever since. The annual Goldsmith Festival, founded in 1985 and one of the oldest literary festivals in Ireland, runs readings here every June Bank Holiday weekend.

Getting there.

By car

Athlone to Tang is about 12 km north on the N55 — allow 15 minutes. Ballymahon is 12 km in the other direction, also 15 minutes. Mullingar is 35 km east, around 45 minutes on smaller roads. The Three Jolly Pigeons sits on the N55 itself, signposted as The Pigeons; the village of Tang is a short side road off it.

By bus

Bus Éireann route 118 runs Athlone–Longford via the N55 several times a day and stops in the area. There is no scheduled service into the village proper. In practice, drivers manage; visitors without a car arrange a taxi from Athlone.

By train

No station. Athlone (Dublin–Galway line) is the nearest, then road for the last 15 minutes.