Twenty-eight prisoners, a handball alley, and the morning the rebellion accelerated
The Carnew Executions, 25 May 1798
By the morning of 25 May 1798, news had reached Carnew that the United Irishmen had risen in County Kildare the previous day. Crown forces had been attacked at Ballymore-Eustace, Naas, and Prosperous. The garrison at Carnew Castle - local yeomanry - were holding a group of men suspected of United Irish membership. No trials had been scheduled. Fearing what a rebellion in the area might mean for prisoners capable of joining it, the garrison commander ordered them marched to the Gaelic handball alley on the edge of town. There, twenty-eight men were executed by firing squad. The same day, twenty kilometres north at Dunlavin, another group of prisoners was killed on the green. The two events together - summary executions of men who had not been tried - ran as news into the farmhouses of south Wicklow and across the Wexford border, lending substance to the worst rumours already circulating about what Crown forces intended. They did not prevent the rebellion. On 7 June, a Wexford rebel column under Anthony Perry came north to Carnew, burned the town, and sacked it. The handball alley where the executions took place is still identified locally.
Norman borough to garrison barracks to private home
Carnew Castle
Carnew first appears in records in 1247 as the Norman borough of 'Carnebothe', granted a Royal Charter by Henry III as an outpost of the Anglo-Norman colonisation of the liberty of Wexford. The earliest defensive structures were motte-and-bailey earthworks; OS maps from the 1830s identified at least seven 'moats' around the town. The stone castle on Main Street dates in its foundations to the early fourteenth century, built by the de Caunteton family, though the structure that stands now is largely a Jacobean rebuild. In 1619 a Welshman named Calcott Chambre leased the castle and established an iron-smelting industry outside the town; during the 1641 rebellion, Chambre and around 160 settlers were besieged in the castle for twenty-two weeks. The castle was damaged in 1798 and again in its aftermath. The Fitzwilliam family had it reroofed in the early nineteenth century. It served as a rectory at some point and has been a private home since at least the mid-twentieth century. It is a three-storey tower house, granite rubble showing through crumbled render, a curved bay on the south elevation and a bartizan on the north-west corner - visible from the road on Main Street.