Carn an Bhua · Co. Wicklow
On 25 May 1798, yeomanry marched 28 prisoners from Carnew Castle to the local handball alley and shot them. News of it spread into Wexford and lit the rebellion.
Carnew sits at the bottom of Wicklow, one mile from the Wexford border, in a stretch of country that feels different from the mountain landscapes further north. The hills here are lower, the farms larger, the air less dramatic. It is a working market town - it has been one since a Royal Charter in 1247 named it a Norman borough - and it does not try to be anything else.
The thing that marks it out, permanently, is 25 May 1798. The United Irishmen rebellion had broken out in County Kildare the previous day. News of it reached the garrison at Carnew Castle by morning. Holding perhaps two dozen suspected rebels in the castle cells - their guilt unproven, their trials unscheduled - the yeomanry marched them out to the local Gaelic handball alley on the edge of town and shot them. The number most often cited is twenty-eight. The same day, a similar massacre took place at Dunlavin, twenty kilometres north. Together the two events ran ahead of the rebellion itself, into the farmhouses of south Wicklow and across the border into Wexford, and turned what had been a planned rising into something rawer and faster. On 7 June, a column of Wexford rebels led by Anthony Perry came north, burned the town, and sacked it in reprisal.
The castle where the prisoners were held is still on Main Street. In its current form it dates mainly to the early seventeenth century - a Jacobean tower house on older Norman foundations, built or rebuilt when Sir Henry Harrington held the barony of Shillelagh. It was damaged in the 1798 violence and reroofed in the nineteenth century by the Fitzwilliam family. It is a private home now, granite rubble visible through crumbling render, a bartizan on the north-west corner. Most people drive past it without knowing what happened on the ground in front of it.
Outside that history, Carnew is a town with a main street, a few pubs, and a landscape of modest south Wicklow farmland in every direction. Tomnafinnoge Woods, the last surviving fragment of the great oak forests of Shillelagh, is about five kilometres away between Shillelagh and Tinahely - the nearest proper walking country. The town itself is a useful base for that border stretch of Wicklow rather than a destination in its own right.
