Captain Tyrrell's ambush
The Battle of Tyrrellspass, 1597
In the Nine Years' War, an English column of around a thousand troops marched out from Mullingar through the bogs of south Westmeath. Captain Richard Tyrrell — a Hiberno-Norman who had thrown in with Hugh O'Neill — was waiting with three or four hundred Irish at the only firm crossing. The fight that followed is the one the village is named for. The English numbers were broken. The figure of one survivor is the one most often given, and it is generous to neither side. The Earl of Tyrone wrote about it afterwards as one of the war's clean wins.
A planned green, 1810
Lady Belvedere's village
Jane, Countess of Belvedere — the wife of the second Earl, the Rochforts of Belvedere House on Lough Ennell — turned what had been a road-side cluster into a single composition in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The crescent of houses, the green inside it, the church at the head, all read as one drawing. She also paid for most of St Sinian's, and she left £5,000 in her will for a children's orphanage that ran here from 1842 until 1943. Estate villages of this kind are rarer in the Irish midlands than in England, and Tyrrellspass is one of the better ones.
The church on the green
St Sinian's
Church of Ireland, built around 1810 under Lady Belvedere's patronage, extended in 1823 with a steeple added by the Countess. Inside is a life-size neoclassical monument to her husband, George Augustus Rochfort, the second Earl of Belvedere, who died in 1814 — carved by John Bacon the Younger, who was a name in London at the time. Worth a look if the door is open. It often is not; ask in the village.