The Roche tower house
Barntown Castle
The castle that survives in Barntown is a late-medieval tower house of the kind that dot the Wexford countryside in the dozens - square plan, thick walls, a defensive door, vaulted ground floor, residential floors above. The Roches were one of the Anglo-Norman families who came in after the 1169 invasion and stayed. They held lands across this part of south Wexford, with the Roches of Garrylough as a notable branch. The tower at Barntown is generally dated to the fifteenth century in its present form, though earlier work on the site is likely. It was abandoned long ago - Wexford's tower houses mostly went out of residential use after the upheavals of the seventeenth century - and the ruin has been sitting in a field, slowly losing stones, ever since. There is no visitor centre. It is the kind of monument you find by asking at the door of the nearest farmhouse.
Two villages, one priest
Glynn-Barntown parish
Barntown shares its Roman Catholic parish with Glynn, a slightly larger village three kilometres south. The parish is in the Diocese of Ferns, the medieval bishopric that ran from Wexford north into the Blackstairs Mountains and was suppressed and revived more than once during the penal era. St. Alphonsus' Church in Barntown is the parish church for this side of the boundary; Glynn has its own church and graveyard. The arrangement is the standard rural Irish one: two villages, one parish priest, one weekly Mass schedule covering both. The school at Barntown - Barntown National School - serves the children of the parish and a stretch of the surrounding townlands.
How the village lives now
A Wexford commuter belt
Modern Barntown is shaped less by its history than by the N25. The Wexford bypass runs along the edge of the parish, putting the village within ten minutes' drive of the town centre, the train station, and the road south to Rosslare Harbour. Over the last thirty years the houses have multiplied - small estates, one-off builds, a primary school that grew with the rooftops. The village still has the bones of an old country parish, but the working day is in Wexford town. The pub trade, the restaurants, the shops, the cinema - all of it is six kilometres east. Barntown is where you sleep. Which is most of what a village in this part of the county is for.