Áth na Sráide · Co. Wicklow
An 18th-century planned cotton town that was meant to rival Bath and never did. Three thousand people once. Now a couple of hundred and a pub.
Stratford-on-Slaney is what happens when an aristocrat with money, ambition and a copy of the Bath street plan decides to build a city in the west Wicklow hills. Edward Stratford, 2nd Earl of Aldborough, laid it out from 1774 on a hill above the River Slaney, gave it his own family name, and meant it to be an industrial town to rival anything in Leinster. The Irish name, Áth na Sráide, means the ford of the street - which tells you the street came first and the rest was supposed to follow.
For a while it nearly worked. Cotton and calico printing began in 1792, and by the early 1800s the works run by Orr Smith & Co, a Paisley firm, employed more than a thousand people and produced around two thousand printed pieces a week. The town reached close to three thousand inhabitants, with three churches and, the records say, fourteen taverns. There was a double crescent of stone houses, an octagonal square, and a principal residence called Mount Amiens with fourteen rooms and walled gardens.
Then it unravelled, the way Irish cotton towns did. British industrial production undercut the works, the mill changed hands and shrank, and the Famine and the fever of 1847 finished what the economics had started. By the mid-1960s, one local account has it, Stratford stood bare but for a dozen houses and the ruins of one man's dream. The 2016 census counted 241 people.
What is left is quiet and a little melancholy in a way that rewards a slow look. The grid of the planned town is still legible in the street names and the layout. The Slaney runs below. There is a pub with a log fire, a second smaller one down the hill, and west Wicklow farmland in every direction. It is a stop between Baltinglass and the Dunlavin road, not a destination - but if you like the bones of failed ambition, it is one of the better ones in the country.