In 1803, Hanover was occupied by troops from Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Army. Up to that point the Electorate of Hanover had been governed by King George III of the United Kingdom. In response to the occupation and the disbandment of the Electorate’s army, thousands of Hanoverian exiles travelled to England where they enlisted in the King’s German Legion of the British Army. The Legion were quickly deployed to Ireland and its soldiers appear to have created a good impression the towns like Tullamore where they were stationed.
Last week we set out reasons why Cormac Street can be considered so good. Anybody getting off the train, visiting the town park or the courthouse cannot but be impressed. The street is very largely intact since it was built and has been enhanced by the town park. The restoration of the full Kilcruttin Hill beside the folly should be undertaken by the municipal council given its historic importance. Charleville/Cormac Street was the outer extremity of the town when building started here in the 1780s. Probably the Elmfield house (now the location of the Aras an Chontae) dates to 1795. Both Norris of that house and Acres of Acres Hall (dated to 1786) were functionaries of the young landlord’s family and both built on the road to the demesne. Bury came of age in June 1786 and so could regulate matters himself. While there were some cabins on Charleville Road these were temporary structures and aside from Elmfield no building leases were granted here until that to Daniel E. Williams in 1898. He completed Dew Park by 1900 and it was then regarded as the best house in Tullamore having taken that honour from Acres Hall. It reflected changing times with the demise and relative impoverishment of the Acres family and the growing importance of the new Catholic merchant class of Egan’s and Williams. While Williams had a virtual freehold in Dew Park lands the Egan family took a long lease from the Acres Pierce family of Acres Hall in 1891. The third big house that of Elmfield may well have earned the first-place honour but the Goodbodys sold this house in the 1880s and moved to Dublin. Richard Bull, the sub-sheriff moved in and departed after 1904 when the house was taken by Dr Kennedy who had moved from The Cottage in O’Moore Street.
The square proper never had a public house until that in GV 5 in recent times, while the Brewery Tap on the western side at GV 3 High Street has served the public for well over 100 years. It was only in 2018 that a new public house and night club was opened at GV 5, now known as The Phoenix. The great garage of G.N. Walshe (GV 1 High Street) replaced the Goodbody hardware store which was in business from the 1840s to 1930 and with a tobacco factory at the rear until 1886.
In the first half of the nineteenth century all of the original buildings in O’Connor Square were three-storey with the exception of the market house and the house where PTSB is now located (GV 8). The finest house was that of Pim/Wilson (GV 7) of c. 1740–48 (demolished 1936) and not unlike the fine houses in the square of the Quaker settlement of Mountmellick where the Pims and Wilsons would have had connections.
Over a series of articles, it is intended to examine the evolution of the ‘market place’, Tullamore to the fine square it is today. It is intended to look first at the evolution of the square over the period from 1713 to 1820 with additional comments on the building history in the last 300 years in the second article. This will be followed with analysis of the return for the 1901 and 1911 censuses and thereafter case studies of two of the houses in the square. Both are public houses, the Brewery Tap and The Phoenix, and business is conducted in the original houses albeit that both have been extended. Both are well known with the Brewery Tap one of the oldest pubs in Tullamore and The Phoenix the newest. The Brewery Tap house can be dated to 1713 and The Phoenix as a house to 1752.
The rugby grounds at Spollanstown have been used for sporting activity in Tullamore for over 140 years. The establishing of the Spollanstown sports field is rooted in the difficult situation in the 1880s when the land war was at its height, the home rule movement was advancing steadily and, increasingly, sporting activities reflected the deep political and religious divide in the country.
Kilbeggan team in 1927-28. Birr was able to affiliate to IRFU in 1887 and Tullamore in 1937(more…)
St Catherine’s Church, 1815. This is the second article to mark the successful Heritage Week 2023. The new St Catherine’s Church was designed by Francis Johnston and was built in the Gothic style with a Latin cross plan, side-aisles, a tower in the west and a crypt at the east end for the burial place of the Bury family. Its situation on Hophill makes it an impressive landmark in Tullamore. Hophill is a glacial mound which rises steeply to a height of about fifty feet above the land around it. It is not clear how the mound acquired its name or when. The earliest known reference to the hill occurs in a lease of 1748. There is a local story that the spoil for digging out the new lake at Charleville was used to construct the site for the new church. While this is not true perhaps some materials were used which gave credence to this story. Originally more pointed, the hill is a natural one.
To mark Heritage Week 2023 we have two articles on St Catherine’s Church, Hop Hill, Tullamore. This week the background from the 1700s to the completion of the new church in 1815. When coming to Tullamore by boat or rail the two most prominent sites to greet the visitor are the spire of the Catholic church completed in 1906 and that of St Catherine’s church, built on the mound known as Hop Hill and completed in August 1815.
We take the presence of the Cof I churches of St Catherine’s, Clara, Shinrone, Geashill, Edenderry and St Brendan’s in Birr (to name a few) for granted. The upkeep is great and the contributors few.More will need to be done to structure support for the upkeep of these buildings.
A Francis Johnston plan with the burial crypt of c. 1808-10. Courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive
Hop Hill site a brave choice
The Hop Hill site was a brave choice as there was work to be done to make it suitable for building and the adjoining ground was soft and prone to flood, especially in the years before the two Brosna drainage schemes of 1850 and 1950. The Tullamore town landlord, Charles William Bury (1764-1835), had reserved the large distillery plot (now the Granary apartments in Market Square) for a church, from about 1800 to 1806. In the latter year then rector, Ponsonby Gouldsbury, and the vestry opted for the Hop Hill site and the new church was largely completed in August 1815. Soon after the old church off Church Street, erected in 1726, was demolished and the site of the church and, possibly an adjoining graveyard, were used for the Shambles or meat market and the remaining land incorporated into the new Market Square or Corn Market. The new Bachelors Walk was worked on from about 1812 as an attractive avenue to the new church from the High Street and from the town’s owner’s new residence, Charleville Castle. The architect for the church was Francis Johnston and for the new avenue, or Bachelors Walk was John Claudius Loudon, the distinguished landscape architect and designer of demesnes.
The young Charles William Bury when aged 28 and just seven years into his estate. He married in 1798 and died in 1835. His best years were up to the completion of the castle. He contributed about £4,000 of the £8,000 it cost to build St Catherine’s.(more…)
Offaly History have a vacancy for a qualified archivist at Offaly Archives (see our blog of 6 Jan. 2023 in regard to the post). Arriving for interview by air balloon would strike a chord. Speaking of which the balloon fire of 10 May 1785 is perhaps the best-known event in the history of Tullamore and yet there are few surviving accounts.
First there were almost no local newspapers serving the midlands at the time. Neither have diaries or letters survived of any of the townspeople of that period save one letter of 12 May 1785 published by way of reportage in the Hibernian Magazine of the fire that occurred on the fair day. This would have been on Tuesday 10 May 1785. The letter from the Tullamore correspondent is clearly the most useful and more informed than similar reports in Finn’s Leinster Journal and Faulkner’s Dublin Journal. Some of these reports put the loss at 130 houses and not 100 as advised to us by the letter writer. One other short note was penned by Molly Burgess (née Pennington) of the Methodist Community who lost their church (dated to 1760) in Swaddling Lane off Barrack/Patrick Street. This lane was also known as Ruddock’s Lane and post 1905 as Bride’s Lane. After the fire the Methodists build a new chapel or preaching house on the site of the present-day church. The current church was build 101 years after the first
Cormac Street is somewhat unique in the story of Tullamore street development with its forty houses, two major institutional buildings and a town park. Rarely is a street preserved without blemish with so many elements over a two-hundred-year period. Cormac Street was also the home of the town’s major property developer and rentier Thomas Acres (d. 1836) who built his Acres Hall in 1786 (now the home of Tullamore Municipal Council). To the earl of Charleville and Thomas Acres is due most of the credit for the transformation of a green field site with Kilcruttin Hill and cemetery to the west and the Windmill Hill to the east. Acres could thank the war with France, 1793–1815, for the boost to the local economy that provided him with tenants for the terrace of houses on the east side. The expansion of Tullamore after 1798 due to the Grand Canal connection with Dublin and the Shannon provided the impetus to secure a new county jail (1826–30), county town status in 1832 and to take effect in 1835 with the completion of the county courthouse. War, politics and pride of place all contributed to the mix. The Bury contribution was rounded off when Alfred (later the fifth earl) secured a new railway station at Kilcruttin in place of that at Clonminch in about 1865.
Cormac Street has had the benefit of careful planning in its first hundred years and has managed to survive the excesses of the post 1960 and post 1997 periods of rapid development. The saving of Acres Hall in the 1980s was a significant achievement. What are these elements that contribute to the street and how did it all come about? Here are set out twenty points and probably more could be added.
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