Cill Anna · Co. Wexford
A crossroads, a church, and the boy from the ballad.
Killanne is a small rural parish in the west of Wexford, in the foothills of the Blackstairs Mountains, a few miles north of New Ross. It has a church, a graveyard, a school, and a name that travels further than the place itself. The reason for that is a man called John Kelly.
Kelly was born in Killanne in 1772 and died at the end of a rope on Wexford Bridge on 25 June 1798. He was twenty-six. He had led a column of pikemen at New Ross on 5 June and taken a leg wound that put him out of the fighting. He was carried into Wexford town to recover; the rebellion collapsed; the yeomanry found him in bed. They hanged him with the other captured leaders and spiked his head over the courthouse.
A hundred years later, in 1898, the Dublin poet P.J. McCall wrote 'Kelly, the Boy from Killanne' for the centenary of the Rising. It went into the songbooks and never came out. That's most of why anyone outside west Wexford knows the village name. Come for the song, stay for the mountain - Mount Leinster and the Blackstairs ridge fill the western sky, and the lanes around the parish are some of the quietest in the county.
