An tAbhallort · Co. Wexford
27 May 1798. A thousand pikes, a hill, a militia wiped out. The rebellion had its first win.
Oulart is a small crossroads village in north-central Wexford with a Catholic church, a GAA pitch, a couple of pubs, and a hill behind it that decided the shape of the summer of 1798. Drive through it on the R741 between Gorey and Wexford and you'll miss it in twenty seconds. Turn off, drive up the lane to the car park at the top of the hill, and the whole geography of the Wexford rebellion lays itself out below you - Boolavogue to the north, Ferns and Enniscorthy to the west, Wexford town and the sea to the south.
What happened here on 27 May 1798 was the rebellion's first real victory. Father John Murphy of Boolavogue had spent the previous night gathering people on the hill after the Camolin yeomanry burned his chapel. Roughly a thousand assembled by morning - mostly farm labourers with pikes and reaping hooks, a few muskets between them. The North Cork Militia came up from Wexford to scatter them. The rebels feinted retreat, the militia followed onto the open summit, and the rebels turned and broke them. All but five of the 110 militiamen were killed. Within a week most of north Wexford was in arms.
The hill today is calm pasture and a marked walking trail with twenty-five memorial stones along the path. The big thing on the summit is Tulach a' tSolais - the Mound of Light - by sculptor Michael Warren and architect Ronnie Tallon, finished for the bicentenary. It is one of the more thoughtful pieces of public sculpture in the country: not a triumphal arch, not a pikeman with his fist in the air, but an earthen mound bisected by a passage, with the light reading as the Enlightenment ideas the rebellion was supposed to be about. Walk up at dusk in May and the wind does most of the talking for you.
