Baile Uí Chearnaigh · Co. Wexford
A bridge, a church on the hill, an inn on the road - and the first blood of 1798.
Ballycarney is not really a village in the visit-it sense. It's a bridge across the Slaney, a church on the height above it, an inn on the road, a crossroads, a graveyard, and a scatter of houses falling away into farmland. Drive between Bunclody and Enniscorthy and you'll be over it before you've decided you were there. Five kilometres west of Ferns, eleven north of Enniscorthy, on the R745. That's the geography.
The reason to slow down is the same as the reason to slow down at Boolavogue - 1798. On the evening of 26 May, the day before Father Murphy's stand at Oulart Hill, the Bunclody Yeomanry rode through the crossroads here and shot Pat and John Redmond, two of three civilian brothers from the townland of Corah. A third brother, Mogue, was wounded and lived. They are the earliest casualties of the Wexford rising - killed before the rebellion had really started, in the panic before it. A memorial went up at the crossroads in 2023 for the 225th anniversary. It is, more or less, the only sign that anything happened here.
The rest is the bridge and the church. The bridge is 1780s, eight arches of cut stone, and a fine place to stand with a camera at evening. The church is All Saints, Church of Ireland, 1834, Board of First Fruits, plain Gothic, well-kept. The Ballycarney Inn on the road has been in the Murphy family since 1969 and is the only pint and the only plate in the village. That, and the Slaney running underneath it all, is what Ballycarney is.