Bridgetown
Baile an Droichid, Co. Wexford

The Ireland's Ancient East
STOP 04 / 06

Baile an Droichid · Co. Wexford

A R736 crossroads with a co-op yard, a secondary school, and a Seanad senator buried up the road.

Bridgetown sits in the Barony of Bargy, on the low farmland south of Wexford town where the roads stop being national primary and start being regional. It is not on the way to anywhere famous unless Kilmore Quay counts, which it does to the people who live here.

What it is: a working village. The co-op yard, the secondary school, the petrol station, a pharmacy, a doctor's surgery, two pubs, a tearoom on Main Street. The 2022 census put 544 people inside the village boundary. The population trebled between 2002 and 2022 because Wexford commuters moved out for the bigger gardens, and the village is still figuring out what that means.

Come if you have a reason. Otherwise it is a stop on the way to the coast - fill up at the filling station, get a coffee at the Button and Spoon, and keep going down the R736 to where the boats are.

Population

544 (CSO 2022)

Walk score

Main Street end to end in eight minutes

Founded

Bridge crossing on the Bargy lowlands; recorded in the Civil Survey of 1654-56

Coords

52.2306° N, 6.5500° W

01 / 05

At a glance.

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

01 The Co-op

Wexford Farmers Co-op, Mulrankin Mills.

One of eleven WFC outlets in the county. The parent society traces back to the Enniscorthy Co-op of 1885 and Loch Garman Co-op of 1919. The Bridgetown yard is where Bargy farmers buy feed and meet each other on a Saturday morning.

Stories & lore → 02 The College

Bridgetown College - the south Wexford catchment.

Opened as a vocational school in September 1952. The new build went up in 1965 - 44 students, five teachers. The catchment runs from Wellingtonbridge to Rosslare Harbour and from Kilmore Quay to Forth Mountain. If you grew up around here, you went here.

Stories & lore → 03 The road

16km from Wexford, 6km from Kilmore Quay.

Not on the N25 - on the R736, the back road from Wexford down to the lobster boats. Bridgetown is the village you stop at for diesel and a sandwich on the way to the Saltees.

Getting there →

02 / 05

The pubs.

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

The Bargy Bar

Local, low-key

Village pub

Named for the barony. The kind of place where the regulars know whose round it is without asking.

Greenacres Bar & Lounge

Functions, weekends

Pub & lounge

On the edge of the village. Does the parish weddings and the funeral teas.

03 / 05

Where to eat.

Place	Type	€	Local note
Button and Spoon	Tearoom	€	On Main Street. Breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea. Bread and cakes baked on the premises. They run a sister café in Wexford town.

04 / 05

Stories & lore.

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

The senator who flew the tricolour

Kathleen Browne of Rathronan

Kathleen Anne Browne (1878-1943) was born at Rathronan Castle just outside the village. She joined Sinn Féin in 1912 and the Volunteers in 1914, flew a tricolour from the castle during the 1916 Rising, and was arrested and held in Kilmainham. She was elected to the Seanad in 1929 as a Cumann na nGaedheal senator. She also wrote the standard early study of the Yola dialect of Forth and Bargy in 1927. The Kathleen Browne Arts & Literary Festival ran in her honour in 2018 and 2019.

Mulrankin Mills

The co-op

Wexford Farmers Co-op runs eleven outlets across the county; the Bridgetown branch is at Mulrankin Mills on the edge of the village. The parent society was knitted together from older co-ops - the Enniscorthy one founded in 1885, Loch Garman in 1919. South Wexford was dairy and tillage country and still is. The co-op is the reason the village has a yard, a weighbridge and a feed store at its centre instead of a heritage centre.

1906-2010

The station that closed

Bridgetown railway station opened on 1 August 1906 on the South Wexford line between Rosslare and Waterford. The service was a single train each way per day by the end. It closed on 18 September 2010 and was replaced by the 370 bus the following Monday. The island platform is still there. The line itself is mothballed, not lifted.