A village, a yeomanry, a war
The Camolin Cavalry
Raised in 1796 by Arthur Annesley, Earl of Mountnorris, of Camolin Park. By June 1798 the corps numbered around 65 troopers and 68 horses, drawn from the Protestant tenantry around the village. On 26 May 1798 a patrol under Lieutenant Bookey rode south from Camolin and burned a cabin at the Harrow, near Boolavogue. The ambush that followed - led by Father John Murphy - killed Bookey and a trooper named Donovan. That fight is the first action of the 1798 Wexford Rebellion. The unit kept going through the rest of the year. The village kept its name.
The blacksmiths who armed the rising
The pikes
The Wexford rebellion ran on pikes - long ash shafts with an iron head, often hooked to cut a horse's reins. The heads were forged at parish forges across the county, Camolin among them. There's no museum to it here, but the local 1798 trail and books like Eamon Doyle's Tales of the Anvil keep the names of the smiths who did the work. Many of those forges were running by night through the spring of 1798. Many of the men who carried the pikes never came back from Vinegar Hill.
The N11, then the M11
The road
Camolin grew up as a stop on the Dublin-Wexford road. For two centuries that meant coaches, then lorries, then a near-constant N11 of holidaymakers heading to Rosslare. The M11 motorway extension from Gorey to Enniscorthy opened on 18 July 2019 and lifted the through-traffic off the village street overnight. Whether that's good or bad depends who you ask - the shops lost the casual stop, the residents got their nights back. The village is still working it out.