Lost in the Trees

Most Irish towns are oriented around a ‘Great House’. Usually the main road (from Dublin or elsewhere) comes up to its imposing gates and turns left or right to follow the demesne wall  in the direction it wants to go.  

Monasterevin in Kildare, hailed as ‘the Venice of Ireland’, is a good example. It is on the old road from Dublin to the West. As you enter on the left side are the ‘Moore Abbey’ walls and the town is on your right. The road west follows the boundary and exits the town via the old Barrow bridge.  

As usual with a manor house Moore Abbey enjoys solitude, hidden by trees up an avenue from imposing gates. It was granted to the Loftus family in 1615 when the land was confiscated from the local Irish and then passed on to the Moores, Earls of Drogheda, who ‘married in’ around 1699 and lived there until after the First World War.

Among the Moore’s ancestors was  Sir Edward Moore who laid out such Dublin streets as Henry St., Mary St., Earl St. and, of course, Moore St. The family’s urban planning tradition was brought to Monasterevin and a ‘modern’ street plan was implement for the town. The Grand Canal was introduced (hence, the ‘Venice of Ireland’ from its canal bridges) and local businesses were encouraged like the brewery whose ’St Patricks Cross Pale Ale’ was once very popular.  

Today Moore Abbey manor house stand intact on its hill above the Barrow. The Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary bought it in 1945 as a home for intellectual disabilities and named it Rosglas after the original monastery on the site.

Monasterevin means ‘Monastery of Evin’, who brought monks from South Munster there in the 7th century and developed a monastery noted for its learning. In fact, Evin deserves greater recognition than the Moores. In Monastervin  he wrote the invaluable Tripartite life of Saint Patrick (in Latin and Irish) and a Life of Saint Comgall of Bangor.

I went looking for his monastery.  

The old name was Ros-Glas-na-Muimneachy (the Green Wood of the Munstermen) and I was told it was somewhere in the Coilte-managed woods of the old demesne. However there was no indication as to where it might have been. The people I met in the woods could tell me that Count John McCormac had lived there for 13 years and the poet John Manley Hopkins visited for its peacefulness. But memories did not go back beyond that.

Only the names of towns like Monasterevin are surviving hints as to who founded them and what was achieved there long before the Normans arrived.