The English that stayed behind
Yola
When the Anglo-Normans landed at Bannow in 1169 they brought a form of Middle English with them. In most of Ireland that language got absorbed, replaced, or evolved into the regional Hiberno-English the country speaks now. Inside the baronies of Forth and Bargy - the southeast peninsula that contains Tagoat - it did neither. Hemmed in by sea, by Wexford town, and by a deep local sense of being separate, the dialect stayed put and went its own way for six hundred years. By the time Jacob Poole was collecting its vocabulary in the early 1800s, Yola was a distinct tongue - recognisably English at the root but with its own grammar, its own vowels, and a lot of words other English speakers had never heard. Yola died as a living speech around the mid-1800s. Recent decades have seen small revival efforts, a glossary or two, a few signs. The graveyards of Forth and Bargy parishes are where the language is most physically present now - the surnames are still the ones Poole wrote down.
A village shaped by traffic
The road
Tagoat is the shape it is because the road made it that shape. The N25 from Wexford to Rosslare Harbour runs straight through the centre and the village is essentially a single line of houses on either side of it. Before the road was the road, there was still a route - pilgrims, traders, and later soldiers came this way between the port and the county town. The opening of Rosslare Harbour as a deep-water ferry terminal in 1906 turned the through-route into a permanent flow of cars and trucks. The village has lived with that traffic for over a century. It is the reason there is still a village here at all, and the reason that village is the shape it is.
Norman surnames in the graveyard
The parish
Read the names on the headstones at St. Mary's and you are reading a record of who Forth has been since the 12th century. Stafford, Sinnott, Whitty, Codd, Devereux, Hay, Furlong, Roche - Norman or Old English surnames that arrived with the Anglo-Norman conquest and never left this corner of Wexford. In most of Ireland these names are rare. In Forth they are the dominant cluster. The same families farmed the same townlands for generations, spoke Yola at home, and were buried in the parish graveyard. The headstones do not say any of that, but the surnames do, and a slow walk around the back of the church gives you the bones of the local history without anyone having to explain it.