Killag, second Tuesday of July
The Bannow & Rathangan Show
The big south-Wexford show is held each July at the showgrounds in Killag, a few minutes from Rathangan village. It takes its name from the two parishes that founded it. The day takes in brood mares and foals, riding classes, Irish draughts, ponies, show jumping, commercial cattle, sheep, sheep-dog trials, poultry, home industries, horticulture, photography, cookery demonstrations and around 300 trade stands. A committee of about fifty parishioners runs it; around 400 stewards work the day. Roughly 15,000 people come through the gate. It is one of the biggest one-day agricultural shows in the country and it is run, end to end, by the two parishes.
A name shared, a place not
Not the Kildare one
There are two Rathangans in Ireland. The big one is in Co. Kildare, on the Grand Canal between Monasterevin and Edenderry - population around 2,500, with several pubs, a working harbour, a long Bord na Móna history and the United Irishman Roger McGuire's 'Defender' associations. The small one is this one. Both names come from the same Irish - Ráth Daingean, the strong ringfort - and the confusion is constant. Locals down here have made a kind of peace with it: 'No, the other one' is a routine half of any phone call. Search engines are worse than people. If you arrived here looking for a canal, you have come a long way wrong.
A parish that built itself a building
The 1873 church
The Catholic church here was built between 1870 and 1873, in the last great wave of post-Emancipation parish-church building in Ireland. The architect was Robert Sinnott of Wexford; the builder James Wilkinson of Enniscorthy. The fabric is local - red conglomerate stone quarried at Nicharee a few miles away - with Carlow granite dressings for the windows and doorways and Cork red marble columns inside, separating the nave from the side aisles. It is a Gothic cruciform plan with seven arches. The dedication, on 5 October 1873, was to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and to St Laurence O'Toole - the 12th-century Archbishop of Dublin who tried, and failed, to negotiate with Henry II after the Normans landed a few miles south at Bannow. The church is the village's only listed building of note.