How a village became a curse
"Go to Ballyhack"
If someone in Ireland tells you to go to Ballyhack, they are not sending you on a day-trip. The phrase, first recorded in print in 1843, means 'go to hell' - and it earned that meaning here. After the 1641 rebellion, Cromwellian forces used the castle as a holding point, and after the Act for the Settlement of Ireland in 1652, dispossessed Catholics were transported through Ballyhack on their way to Connacht or to indentured labour in the West Indies. The village name became shorthand for ruin. The villagers, understandably, do not put it on the welcome sign.
Warrior monks on the estuary
The Hospitallers
The Knights Hospitaller of St John - one of the two great military orders of the Crusades, the other being the Templars - built the tower house around 1450. The site itself is older. There was likely a Templar preceptory here in the 12th century, established to protect pilgrims and to control the rivermouth, before the Order was dissolved in 1312 and its lands passed to the Hospitallers. The tower you see today is Hospitaller work: five storeys, walls intact to the wall walk, with a small chapel built into the second floor. Heritage Ireland runs it now, but the bones are theirs.
A ferry older than most countries
The crossing
There has been a ferry across this water for centuries - possibly since the medieval period, certainly since the 1600s. Without it, the road from south Wexford to Waterford City is a 50-kilometre detour through New Ross. With it, you are across in five minutes. The current operator, Passage East Ferry Company Ltd, runs the service every ten to fifteen minutes, year-round. The pricing is per car, paid on board. The schedule is the schedule of the tide and the queue and the weather, and everyone is fine with that.
Where Cromwell came in
The Hook loop
Cromwell is supposed to have said he would take Waterford 'by Hook or by Crooke' - meaning by Hook Head on the Wexford side or Crooke village on the Waterford side. Ballyhack sits between the two ends of that line. Whether the quote is real or a 19th-century invention, the geography is real. The Hook Peninsula is the way armies and pilgrims and traders moved between sea and river for a thousand years, and the castle on the slope above the ferry is the receipt.