An early monastery and a graveyard ruin burnt in 1649
St Enan, Cromwell, and two churches
Glenealy was an early Christian site. The monastery here is associated with St Enan, a figure linked to St Kevin of Glendalough, whose monastic city lies up the same valley. In the old graveyard stand the ruins of a church said to have been burnt by Oliver Cromwell's army in 1649, as it marched south from the storming of Drogheda toward Wexford. The village carries two later churches that face each other across the valley. The Church of Ireland church is a plain granite building of 1792, four bays and single-storey, built in granite rubble with ashlar dressings and a pointed-arch door. The Catholic church, St Joseph's, came later: designed by the Dublin firm of Pugin and Ashlin - the practice of George Ashlin, son-in-law of the great Gothic Revivalist A.W.N. Pugin - and dedicated on 4 October 1869, with granite dressings cut by John Brady from the Ballyknocken quarries. For a village this small to hold a Pugin-school church is the kind of thing easy to drive past without noticing.
A Boer War word for community, and Douglas Hyde teaching Irish
The Laager Hall
The original hall in Glenealy was built in the 1890s, up behind the Pound Field, around the time of the Boer War. Men from the village had served in the British Army in South Africa, and they brought home the Afrikaans word laager - a defensive circle of wagons - which they took to mean, loosely, a community drawn together. They gave the word to the new hall. What happened inside it cuts the other way against the imperial origin of the name: it became a centre of the Gaelic League revival, with Irish-language classes and Irish literature, and one of the teachers who gave classes there was Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League and later the first President of Ireland. The original hall fell into decay and a new Laager Hall was built for meetings in what is now the Annsbrook estate. The name held.
Sixteen Wicklow senior titles from six hundred people
A hurling village
Wicklow is a football and a mountain county, and hurling is the minority code in most of it. Glenealy is the exception. Glenealy Hurling Club has won the Wicklow Senior Hurling Championship sixteen times, a record that puts a village of a few hundred people at the top of the county game. The most recent strong run included a county final win over Carnew in 2018, and the club has carried Wicklow's flag into Leinster competition. In a place this small, the hurling field and the club are a large part of what holds the village together through the year. If you want to understand Glenealy, a championship match on a Sunday tells you more than the main street will.