From Drangan to Kelly country

The village of Drangan sits just north of Slievenamon Mountain.  Over a pint,  at the pub across the road from the cemetery, the local publican told how as a child she'd heard of the killing of Patrick Boland's daughter, Bridget Cleary.

'The nuns made us feel it was something to be ashamed of,' she'd confided.

Looking north along the main street in Drangan.  The cemetery is just beyond the monument.

 

Some of the names associated with the dark events that took place up the road at Ballyvadlea in March 1895 can be found in the graveyard opposite the pub.  

The Bolands are there, nestled in the damp earth only two hundred metres from where Michael Cleary, accompanied by the limping 'medicine man' John Dunne told the local priest his wife had gone missing.........  

To the east is Mullinahone, where  the Fenian, David Power Conyngham welcomed home the local battalion of the Papal Brigade, after it had valiantly served that scoundrel, Pope Pius the 9th, in the Garibaldian Wars.

Throughout Tipperary and Limerick there remain fragments of beguiling memory about Garibaldi. Seventy-seven-year old, Nelius Fitzpatrick remembers the priest in Kilfinnane -where the Clearys, Danaghers and Dalys joined up in 1860- declaring that the funeral costs of a member of the Corbett family would be donated by the church 'on account of past services to the Pope'. 

To the west of Mullinahone is the village of Moyglass.  Among those buried in the cemetery opposite the pub are Comdt. Sean Walshe and his brothers Maurice and Denis of the Third Tipperary Brigade.  The date, 1916-23, is a telling reminder that the Walshe boys didn't join Michael Collins and the Free Staters.  Such was Eamon de Valera's ascendancy in the 1930s there's hardly a memorial anywhere commemorating those who accepted the Treaty and went Free State in 1922. 

The village of Moyglass.  In the foreground is the Walshe plot.

John 'Red' Kelly might well have been buried in Moyglass if he hadn't nabbed James Cooney's two pigs during a 4.00am raid on 7 December 1840.  One wonders what his boy Ned might have done if the old man hadn't taken off from this field in search of Cooney's pigs. 

The field in Moyglass where Red Kelly's hut had been.

 

The road that Red Kelly walked.