Canon John Lambe's tour notes from
the 1993 Slieveardagh Summer School field trip

We pass through the townlands of Newpark, Bawnlea, Knockatooreen and Grangehill. We are now in the former territory of one of Tipperary's great estates- Kilcooly Abbey of the Barker-Ponsonby family. The estate confiscated from the Cistercians in the 1840s was initially granted to the Ormond Butlers, purchased from the Earl of Ormond in 1636 by a spectacular and sharp legal operator Jerome Alexander (c1590-1670). After many complex transactions in the seventeenth century the land came through marriage in 1676 to the Barkers of Essex. Kilcooly has many features which make it an ideal venue for any student of Irish history and society. The demesne of the original estate with the Big House, Church of Ireland, farmyard, formal lake and the magnificent remains of the Cistercian Abbey. We are passing along the hill rim of the property now and it was to here in 1772 that a Palatine colony came from the mother settlement at Adare- Rathkeale county Limerick. The colony had two aims, firstly the strengthening of the Protestant population and secondly the reclamation of the acid hill lands. Leases strictly forbade them to sublet to any "papist" nor could they even let grazing to their Catholic neighbours. The land divisions reflect a type of striping arrangement -linear shaped fields running up slope to give each farmer equal compliments of variable land. There is evidence that the arable land was worked in a form of 'rundale' - no field boundaries only mearings.

 The Palatines maintained a tenacious hold on their hill homes. A Baptist chapel (1815) and an Erasmus Smith school (1821) nurtured their cohesiveness as a community. Neither Protestant nor Catholic could survive in large numbers in a farm based economy and many Palatines were forced to emigrate to Canada. There are a few examples of early vernacular farm buildings which proclaim Germanic trappings -more recent developments involve rationalisation and reclamation. Indeed the removal of surplus water has been for centuries the primary task of the hill farmers on these impermeable soils.

 From the tower erected to commemorate Wellington's victory at Waterloo we can get an idea of the geography of Slieveardagh within the wider context of the south midlands of Ireland.  Below us to the west are the great lowlands of mid-Tipperary. The mountain and hill rims of this limestone plain littered with glacial debris and deep basin peat read like a geography text, Slieve Blooms, Devils Bit, Keeper Hill, Slieve Felim, gap of the Golden Vale, Slievenamuck, Galtees, Knockmealdown, Comeragh and Slievenamon.

Kilcooly estate is an interesting survival: its proprietors particularly Tom Ponsonby who was associated with the revolutionary work of his uncle Horace Plunkett and A.E. Russell, pioneers of the co-operative movement in Ireland. He developed the timber industry at Kilcooly and the sawmills employed at peak 85 men. The estate however was dismembered by the Land Commission in the 1930s. Rather than have the demesne apportioned into small farms the Ponsonby's leased the greater part to the Forestry Commission retaining under 300 acres in their own hands.

Kilcooly Abbey.

Kilcooly probably a daughter house of Jerpoint, may have been an Irish foundation which adopted the Benedictine rule. Called by the Cistercians monasterium de arvi campo 'the monastery of the plain of corn' -a reference both to the fertility of the soil and to the older territorial name Magh nAcrah -'the plain of corn'. The patron of the new Cistercian foundation was Domhnall Mor Ua Briain in 1184. Very little is known of its early history apart from some incidental references in the records of the General Chapter of the Cistercians. We know that the Abbot of Kilcooly was present at the General Chapter in 1201; on 9 May 1228 Stephen de Lexinton had a narrow escape from death at the hands of a party of robbers as he made his way towards Kilcooly. The abbey was destroyed by fire in 1444 and what remains today are the ruins of the reconstructed buildings built during the Abbacy of Philip O'MolBardayn alias O'Brothe (O'Brophy). Philip was succeeded by his son, William, who received a papal dispensation to hold the office.

The monuments of Kilcooly testify to the existence of a family of stone carvers -the O'Tunnys who left a rich legacy in Kilcooly and around the Tipperary-Kilkenny borderlands.

“Roricus O'Tuyne scripsit” is written on the elaborately carved tomb of Piers Fitz Og Butler who reclines in death with his wolfhound lying at his. feet and the apostles with the symbols of their calling. The large nave has a beautiful west window and the abbot's seat at the epistle side with three splays of foliage ornament overhead and the Butler coat of arms: opposite is the prior's sedile on the gospel side. The traceried east window captures the lightness and artistry of master craftsmen but the most enigmatic and colourful monuments are the Crucifixion scene, St Christopher patron of the traveller with the Infant Jesus on his shoulder, the incongruous mermaid with mirror and fish, representing the temptress and the pelican a bird with strong symbolic connotations. This is a magnificent structure: any parish would be proud to have such a treasure. It represents both a vision of the world and man's destiny within it. The spiritual was very much subject to the temporal and Kilcooly was suppressed and granted to the Butlers at the Reformation.

Clonamiclon

"Upon this land stands a good castle, a slate house with a large bawne and some houses abroade", C.S. Tipperary,i,p.128.  Clonamiclon Castle is an enigmatic site but it was the core of a Butler estate founded in the early fourteenth century by a cadet branch of the Earls of Carrick. "Pierce Lord Viscount Ikeryn Irish Papist" is listed as 'proprietor in 1640 of the castle and 1031 acres including 400 arable and 600 mountain pasture. This arrangement of mixed lowland and high ground appears to have been typical. Clonamiclon was an unsettled place in the 1640s as it commanded a strategic site from Munster to the Confederation capital of Kilkenny. The castle is massive in appearance and consisted of the earlier tower house and the remains of a seventeenth century Tudor House. Guntowers protect the northeast and northwest walls of the castle and there is access from them to the bawn walls. The tomb of Clonamicklon's major developer Piers Fitz Og Butler is in Kilcooly nearby.

The castle and the Cistercian abbey were the medieval anchors of society and settlement. Shifting polity, the Reformation in particular, brought new arrangements. Subsequently Clonamicklon belonged to the Cooke family.

 Buolick

Earliest documentary evidence of this key location for the study of Irish settlement history is in the papal taxation lists of 1281 and 1302 respectively. Like many medieval Tipperary parishes its income and administration was granted to the Hospital of St John in Dublin. Subsequently it became part of the Ormond portfolio. In the Civil Survey its 1000 acres were divided into 700 arable limestone, 100 mountain pasture and 200 bog pasture, again indicating the topographical mix of the parish.

James, Earl of Ormond, was returned as proprietor and the surveyors recorded "a good castle and some cabbins wanting repair". But what has attracted most attention in the C.S. is the evidence of open field agriculture -"the sd. six acres of Gleabeland is dispersed upp and downe in severall ridges amonghts the lands of Buolick." The Down Survey corroborates this evidence. The features remaining, at this important site are motte, early medieval church with fortified tower and a later tower house. Many settlement historians believe that excavations in the precincts of Buolick would reveal street patterns and house foundations of a medieval village. Another very important motte to the east of Buolick in the townland of Coole was destroyed in recent years.

Buolick was the eighteenth century centre of the Catholic parish but new arrangements required new sites and the churches of the nineteenth century were erected in the emerging villages of New Birmingham (1813-1815) and Gortnahoe (1820). Buolick's preservation was linked to the continuing use of the graveyard but its desertion demonstrates the pragmatic nature of the nineteenth century Catholic Church.

From Buolick we travel westwards under the escarpment of the Slieveardagh hills. This limestone corridor has been the focus of arable agriculture over the centuries and the location of the Anglo-Norman settlement of Buolick demonstrates their interest in cereal cultivation. There are some good examples of "vernacular" farm architecture and roadside cottages constructed by the Local Authority, evidence of the two main social classes in the district -those who owned and worked the land and those who worked with either Bord na Mona or in the coalmines. There are few examples of Land Commission houses in the area which suggests that apart from Kilcooly the large landed estate was not typical of landowning arrangements. We pass through Ballysloe, the village successor of Buolick with its junction site. Much afforestation has taken place on the hill slopes in response to new initiatives in agriculture and there are signs everywhere of the removal of field boundaries.

  Glengoole - New Birmingham

is another example of the complex origins of our settlement and its rich diversity in such a small area. The village betrays few signs of the grand scheme of its early nineteenth century proprietor Vere Hunt to build a town rivaling Birmingham in the West M1dlands of England. Vere Hunt's core property was at Curragh Chase, near Rathkeale, county Limerick but this remarkable man, who has left an engaging diary of his travails, devoted considerable energy towards building his new town in the early 1800s. The surviving documents serve as ample warning to those who would be innovators. Vere Hunt's plan was to entice through favourable leasing' arrangements the more important elements in the village community shopkeepers, tradesmen. He established fairs, a charity school, police barracks and post office. He hoped through canvassing family friends in the Dublin administration to be allocated a military barracks and he believed that a link to New Birmingham from the proposed Grand Canal would help revitalise his collieries and develop his town. Vere Hunt's diary is one of the few examples surviving of a detailed account of the great problems in establishing a new settlement in early nineteenth century Ireland. It clearly reveals the limitations on the power of the local landlord whether through inability to influence government or to "get in" the rent. The diary shows an Ireland little revealed in the official documents.

 The landlord's friendship with the parish priest and their partnership in erecting the Catholic Church in New Birmingham is one of the more engaging revelations in the diary. Although the Church was commenced in 1813 it wasn't officially finished until the 1830s. Hunt's grand design failed through lack of capital and the economic downturn which followed the termination of the Napoleonic wars. His successors, including the poet Aubrey de Vere, managed New Birmingham from a distance. The limestone quarry in the village was used extensively in the new buildings of Vere Hunt's town. One can clearly see how the hill country sits on a massive bed of limestone.