Clohamon
Cloch Ámainn, Co. Wexford

A bridge, a Georgian house, a meat plant and the bones of a cotton mill - all on the Slaney.

Clohamon is a townland and a small rural village on the River Slaney, three kilometres south of Bunclody and just upstream of Ferns. You arrive over a cut-stone bridge, you pass a crossroads, and you are out the other side before you have decided you were there. The civil parish is Kilrush, the barony is Scarawalsh, the diocese is Ferns. The road signs say Cloch Ámainn - the stone of Amann - which is what the Kavanaghs of Leinster called this stretch of the river when they had their seat here in the medieval centuries before Bunclody, then called Newtownbarry, was laid out as a post town in the late 1500s.

The two things to slow down for are both about the river. The first is the bridge, a late-18th or early-19th-century arch crossing of cut granite that is the reason the village sits where it does. The second is Clohamon House, set back behind walls on the east bank - a bow-fronted Georgian house of around 1780, sitting on what is thought to be the footprint of a 17th-century long house known as Clohamon Castle. The Levinge family owned it for most of the 19th century; Sir Richard Levinge was a manager at Arthur Guinness & Co. and the place ran for years as the Guinness fishing lodge. The Slaney was, and is, a salmon and sea-trout river, and the big house on the bank made sense. The 19th-century enterprise that pulled a working village together here belonged to William Lewis, who ran cotton and flour mills on the left bank of the Slaney and employed upwards of a hundred hands. Lewis died in 1868; the cotton machinery was broken up and sold to England as scrap. The mill site is now an ABP Slaney Foods beef-processing plant at Ryland Lower - quietly one of the largest employers in north Wexford and not, on the face of it, the reason you came. The village around it is small, mostly residential, with a pub at the crossroads and the church on the hill and not much else. That is Clohamon.