The lost dialect of Forth and Bargy
Yola
The baronies of Forth and Bargy - the southeastern corner of Wexford that contains Cleariestown - were the strongest pocket in Ireland of Yola, a fossilised form of Middle English carried in by the Norman-Welsh settlers after 1169 and preserved by the area's relative isolation from both Gaelic Ireland and the later English of Dublin. Travellers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries collected vocabulary lists and songs in Yola and noted how impenetrable it was to outsiders, even to other English speakers. By the time of the Great Famine the dialect was already retreating; the last reasonably fluent speakers died in the late nineteenth century. There is no living Yola today, but it survives in place-names, family names, and a small written corpus - and the field-shape and parish pattern around villages like Cleariestown is, in part, what that community left on the ground.
30 May, the opening week of the Rising
Three Rocks, 1798
Forth Mountain - the low ridge of granite and gorse that closes the view north of the village - was the site of the Battle of Three Rocks on 30 May 1798. A column of the North Cork Militia and a small detachment of artillery, marching down from Wexford town to relieve Duncannon, were ambushed on the hill by a much larger force of United Irishmen who had moved up out of the Bargy country overnight. The Crown column was scattered, the cannon were taken, and that afternoon the insurgents walked into Wexford town more or less unopposed. It was one of the rebel side's clearest tactical successes of the rising. The hill is in plain sight from Cleariestown; the engagement was fought across ground that the village's farmers would have known by every field name.
Cleariestown and Rathangan
Parish, not village
The unit that organises life here is the Catholic parish of Cleariestown and Rathangan - two villages, one priest, a shared heritage group, and a shared sense that the parish is the real address. The Roman Catholic church in Cleariestown stands with its graveyard adjoining; the headstones are the village register going back generations. The Cleariestown Rathangan Heritage Group has, over years, gathered the local end of that record - the Yola scraps, the 1798 traditions, the parochial-house history, the names. If you want to understand a South Wexford crossroads, this is the level to ask at: not the village, but the parish that holds it.