Ros Mhic Thriúin · Co. Wexford
An 800-year-old Norman port that built itself a famine ship to remember by.
New Ross sits on the steep west bank of the River Barrow, where the tide still pushes thirty kilometres inland from the sea. William Marshal - the great Norman knight, regent of England, the man who held King John's kingdom together - founded the town with his wife Isabel de Clare around 1207. Marshal had married into half of Leinster through Isabel; together they laid out a planned port and threw a bridge over the Barrow, and within a century New Ross was the busiest harbour on the island, ahead of Waterford and Dublin both.
The river built it and the river hollowed it out. In 1845 a New Ross merchant family, the Graves, launched an emigrant barque called the Dunbrody. Within months the potato crop failed, and for the next six years the Dunbrody and ships like her ran the corridor to Quebec and Boston with as many people as could be packed below decks. One of those people, in 1848, was a twenty-six-year-old cooper from Dunganstown called Patrick Kennedy. His great-grandson came back in June 1963.
What you see today is a working town that knows what it is. The Dunbrody replica sits at the quay where the original loaded. The Kennedy Homestead is still run by Patrick Kennedy's descendants in the same farmyard. The Ros Tapestry - fifteen hand-embroidered panels of Marshal-era history - hangs in a building on the waterfront. The Tholsel watches the river. St Mary's is a roofless 13th-century shell on the highest point in the town, and you can still trace the medieval streets in the way the lanes climb.
Don't try to do it all in an afternoon. The Dunbrody alone takes ninety minutes, the Homestead is a half-day with the drive, and the Arboretum twelve kilometres south asks for another. Stay one night. Walk the quay at dusk when the bypass traffic is gone and the river goes still and the place quietly reverts to what it has always been.
