2 Jun 2023
This morning we had a final walk around the Temple Bar area
of Dublin. It is a part of Dublin that is full of colour and interesting
sights, such as the cannons at the entrance to the Bank of Ireland!
Our rental car is a lot more basic than the one we had in Scotland/England. No GPS, no air conditioning (not good for the planned hottest weekend of the year!), and basic stick shift – but it’s very easy to drive and has a proper hand brake (reminds me of my Colt), so I think it will do us well. Just got a bit hot today, and I’m really wishing that I didn’t give Rog my shorts to take back home with him after Turkey.
Our first stop after we left Dublin was in a charming village called Clonmel, about a two-hour drive south of Dublin. We knew that our Bagwell ancestors had lived in this area in the 1700s but didn’t really plan to do any family investigating, instead thinking that we would use Clonmel as a lunch stop and then keep going down to Fermoy. During lunch we did a bit of reading up on the Bagwell family and discovered that they were possibly buried in the old St Mary’s Church about a 10-minute walk away. We decided to wander up to the church for a look around, but on the way passed a lovely old building that looked like a marketplace and had been turned into a museum. We popped our head in to ask what the building was and very quickly found out that it had belonged to the Bagwell family (as did most of the town and beyond, apparently). The lovely lady in the museum explained the history of Clonmel to us and in particular the history of the building, which turned out to be called The Main Guard as it used to house the Bagwell militia. She then told us about Marlfield church (where she had married), about 3 km out of town, and the Marlfield House which was built by the Bagwell family. Apparently, the whole village of Marlfield had been built by the family. She also told us that there were Bagwell memorials inside the old St Mary’s Church. If we hadn’t popped inside The Main Guard, we wouldn’t have found out how big a connection our family had to this area. It was such an amazing situation for Mum and me.
The old St Mary’s Church turned out to be equally amazing. It is set in a very well maintained, ancient graveyard, surrounded by the originally town wall. Stunning! Unfortunately, it was not open, however there were workmen working on the shutters of the bell tower. Mum approached the foreman to see if he knew if the caretaker was around, but he wasn’t as he had left early for the holiday weekend. However, the foreman then offered to let us into the church anyway! It was such a special moment to walk into the church and find memorials to our Bagwell family on the wall by the altar. Definitely a ‘pinch me’ scenario for us.
We then drove out to Marlfield and visited Marlfield House which was built by John Bagwell in the early 1800s. It is looking a bit sad – currently broken up into apartments and very run down. It is currently for sale for 1.35 million Euros, and apparently would take about another 1 million Euros to renovate it back to it previous glory. It must have been so impressive when it was looked after. We also popped over to see the very quaint Marlfield Church, which is built on the site of an old abbey. Apparently, Bagwell used the stones from the abbey to build The Main Guard, so there is no longer any trace of the original abbey on site.
After all of this excitement, we continued our drive south to
Fermoy, which will be our base for the next four nights as we explore County
Cork.
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