The oldest town?

Is Roscrea the oldest town in Ireland?

Were there even towns in Ireland before the Vikings settled in Dublin and Waterford? 

Today Roscrea is a Heritage Town of 6,000 people centred on an impressive 13^th century stone castle. Inside its walls is the elegant three-storey Georgian Damer House from the early 18th century. Among its facilities is an information office.

I went there to find out about the town’s origins. The two friendly ladies in the office apologised for the absence of their colleague more knowledgeable of that period and did their best to inform me.  The town had been founded by St Cronan in 610 and his High Cross and Pillar Stone were in the nearby Black Mills. Unfortunately the Mills were closed that day but there was a copy of the cross on its original site nearby.  

Gradually I put St Cronan’s story together. It helped that his ’Life’ had been written in 11th century Latin, though sometimes over-enthusiastically.      

Cronan left Tipperary  to study with a famous scholar at Assaroe, Galway. To quote the biography, there  ‘Like a prudent bee he collected honey, that is, the sweetness of religion and piety’.

He graduated to the already-famous monastic centre of Clonmacnoise where he got a reputation as a gifted student with a habit of taking time off from books and prayer to look after travellers and the poor.    

Eventually this is what led him to found Roscrea. When he returned home he first settled at remote Seanros, near the hermits’ lake island of Monaincha known as ‘The Island of the Living Saints’.

However he did not want to be completely cut off. When a group of visitors looking for him got lost in the forest he said, ‘I shall not stay here in a remote place where neither guest nor the poor can find me. I shall stay on the public road where they will be able to come and see me.’

He moved to where the ancient highway, the Slighe Dala, passed on its way from Tara to Limerick and there the town of Roscrea sprang up. He died in the year 640 but already his monastery was famous, eventually earning its own Round Tower.  Its scriptorium produced the 8th-century Book of Dimma, now in Trinity College Dublin, and the medieval Annals of Roscrea.

A substantial town grew around the monastery, an important stage on the ancient Slighe Dala highway. Was it the first town in Ireland? Probably not. There were other expanding monastic towns appearing in the Irish county side at that time.

When the Vikings arrived it was these towns that they attacked for slaves and valuables. This led to building their own towns, for exporting booty rather than servicing communities. Ireland entered a new era of progress. 

Roscrea survived Viking and other attacks and deserves its ‘Heritage’ status for what it has preserved.  However the image of Cronan on the centre-top of the 12^th century Romanesque doorway is fading and perhaps memories of what he stood for.