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Roscommon
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More or less in the centre of the county, there's nothing much to
ROSCOMMON
, but it's an oddly pleasant town to spend time and soak up the atmosphere. Its solid tone is set by heavy, stone buildings - among them the Bank of Ireland, once the courthouse, and the
county jail
, now housing a collection of shops, its serrated top giving the town a characteristic silhouette, identifiable for miles around. The jail was the scene of all public hangings in the county and used to have a woman executioner called Lady Betty, whose own sentence for murder was revoked on condition that she did her gruesome job for free.
Roscommon boasts two impressive ruins: on the Boyle road out of town, the enormous and well-preserved Roscommon Castle was built by the Normans in 1269, burnt down by the Irish four years later and rebuilt in 1280. Remodelling clearly continued for some time - there are some incongruously refined windows among the massive walls. The other ruin, in the lower part of the town, is the abbey . Roscommon takes its name from a Celtic saint, St Coman, who was the first bishop here and under whom the see became well known as a seat of learning, having close ties with the more famous abbey at Clonmacnois in County Offaly. The priory ruin, however, is Dominican, dating from 1253. Amazingly enough, despite the religious persecution that followed the Reformation and the Plantations, the Dominicans managed to hang on well into the nineteenth century, the last two incumbents, parish priests of Fuerty and Athleague, dying in 1830 and 1872 respectively.
The church in the centre of town houses a slightly higgledy-piggledy
museum
of local history (April-Oct daily 10am-5.30pm; free), the kind of place that museologists are beginning to regard as an endangered species. The building's striking Star of David window was put there by its nineteenth-century Welsh builders in honour of their patron saint. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Ireland,
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