Kevin Ffrench's life's work
The Shell Cottage
Kevin Ffrench (1921-2003) was a sailor who came home, settled into a 19th-century thatched cottage at Cullenstown, and started picking shells off the strand. He kept picking them up for thirty-odd years. The cottage's exterior walls became a slow-grown mosaic - lozenges, circles, geometric panels, scenes pulled from local life. A dolphin he was working on the year he died is still on the gable. It's a private home - his granddaughter lives there - but you can see it from the road. Storms have done their work; a restoration fund has been raised. Look, don't touch. Don't go past the gate.
Keeragh and the geese
The strand and the islands
A mile and a half offshore from the strand lie the two small Keeragh Islands - a Natural Heritage Area, a cormorant breeding colony, and the winter quarters of barnacle geese that fly down each October from Greenland and leave again in April. You can't land on them. You can watch them from the beach with a pair of binoculars and a flask of something hot.
The lost language of Forth and Bargy
Yola country
South Wexford was, until the late 19th century, the only place outside England where a pre-modern English dialect survived continuously. The Normans landed at Bannow in 1169 and the Welsh archers and English settlers who came with them stayed. Hemmed in by the bay and the bog, their speech drifted but never died - until improved roads and national schooling in the 1800s walked it out the door. The last fluent speakers were gone by the 1880s. The placenames around Cullenstown - Tacumshane, Bargy, Bannow itself - are the survivors.