Dún Cormaic · Co. Wexford
A thatched pub on the main street and a strand five minutes south. Bargy country.
Duncormick is a one-pub crossroads village in the old barony of Bargy, in the corner of south Wexford between Wexford town and Kilmore Quay. The name comes from a 6th-century fortress - Dún Cormaic, Cormac's fort - said to belong to Cormac Mac Diarmata of the Uí Bairche, who was briefly king of Leinster. The fort is long gone. What survives is the name, a thatched pub on the main street, a small Catholic church, a river bridge and a stretch of disused railway platform where the South Wexford line ran from 1906 to 1976. The village had about 250 people in the 1850s. It has about 120 now. The rest went where the rest always go.
This is Yola country. Until the mid-1800s the baronies of Forth and Bargy - the south-east tip of Wexford - spoke their own dialect, a Middle-English survival brought in by the Normans in 1169 and kept alive in pockets for six hundred years. Most of the vocabulary was Old English; the borrowings were Irish and French. By the time the railway came it had stopped being a daily language, but it left its mark on the placenames around here - Killag, Tomhaggard, Tagoat, Cullenstown - and on the way the older people still speak. Duncormick is not a Yola museum. It is just a village in the country where Yola once was, and that is the texture of the place.
The reason you actually come is the coast. Cullenstown Strand is five minutes south by car, a long flat beach looking out at the Saltee Islands and the small uninhabited Keeragh Island. Ballyteige Burrow National Nature Reserve runs west of it - nine kilometres of dune system, one of the most important coastal habitats on the south-east. You park, you walk, you come back to Sinnott's for a pint. That is Duncormick. There is not more to it, and the people who live here are not pretending there is.
