Notes and Musings

The sun from the day before had packed up and gone home. Clonmacnoise was back to its usual self: overcast, drizzly, and the kind of damp that gets into the seams of everything you own.

I came prepared. Sort of. My bag held flatbreads, hummus, apples, cashews, a Coke, and my not-so-useful non-raingear, which by now I’d stopped expecting anything from. I also had one piece of kit that turned out to be the MVP of the whole trip: a dustpan brush bought at Tesco in Athlone.

A very old place to be buried

A little context, because Clonmacnoise is not just any graveyard. St Ciarán founded a monastery here in 544, on the banks of the Shannon, right where the main east–west route across the midland bogs meets the river. It grew into one of the great centres of learning in early Christian Ireland, with students coming from all over Europe, and it flourished from roughly the 8th to the 12th centuries.

Being rich and famous came at a price. Clonmacnoise was raided at least 27 times by the Irish, at least seven times by the Vikings and at least six times by the Normans. The final blow came in 1552, when the English garrison from Athlone destroyed and looted it.

What’s left is still remarkable: a cathedral, nine churches, two round towers, three high crosses (the originals, including the 10th-century Cross of the Scriptures, are now safe inside the visitor centre, with replicas standing outside) and more than 700 early Christian grave slabs. Rory O’Connor, the last High King of Ireland, was buried here in 1198.

So when I crouch over a Coughlan stone in the chapel, my people are lying in the same ground that kings, abbots and scholars chose for nearly fifteen hundred years. No pressure, then.

The chapel stones

I spent three hours crouched over the gravestones in the chapel. Three hours. My knees have opinions about it.

I wanted transcriptions of all of those amazing Coughlan stones, because many of them aren’t on Findagrave. That’s not because nobody bothered. It’s because they’re so hard to read. Lichen, wear, sinking, centuries of weather: these stones don’t give up their names easily.

What I really wanted was a clipboard. What I had was no notebook at all, because mine had gone for the wrong kind of walk. So I used the folded-up notes I’d brought for the Valuation Office and wrote on the blank folded bits. Genealogy is nothing if not resourceful.

Then out came the dustpan brush. I swept away leaves, and on one stone, about two inches of water. That one was a real test of patience. I’d brush the muddy water off, read as much as I could in the few seconds before it crept back over the surface, and then brush again. Read, brush, read, brush. A letter here, a date there.

Some stones wouldn’t give anything up to the eye at all, so I read them by touch, running my fingers along the carving like braille. For the bits that are still unreadable, I’m pinning my hopes on AI photo enhancement to coax out a few more letters.

I still have to type them all up from my little folded scraps. That’s a job for a weekend day back home – and a big pot of tea.

What’s left

Many of the stones on the old grounds are sinking or falling. Staff told me that many years ago there were so many you could hardly walk (everyone wanted to be buried there, apparently you are guaranteed to get into Heaven!) but many had to be removed for safety. The caretakers told me there are countless graves here, laid down over many hundreds and thousands of years, and what we can see now are simply the stones that remain above ground.

I asked if anyone had ever made a map – the locals know where some of the unmarked graves are, they told me. And they told me there had been a transcription effort many years ago – a whole team from a university came out – but due to legal battles the actual map and stone transcriptions were never provided. Depriving the world of naming those who laid here seems a crime in and of itself. I would want to win the lottery simply to get this done before more transcriptions fade into history.

The final burial in the old graveyard was in 2023. A woman told me the family talked it over with the caretakers and chose a flat stone, because it would have a better chance of surviving a long, long time. I loved that. It’s a family thinking ahead about the people who’ll come looking, maybe hundreds of years from now.

People like me, with a dustpan brush.

The “new” cemetery (or, the Egan cemetery)

Then I wandered over to the new site, which is mostly newer memorials. Honestly, they should rename it the Egan cemetery. There were so many Egans! But there were Coughlans too, and Deverys, and all the other surnames that have become old friends from researching this area. Walking those rows felt a bit like flipping through my research notes, except in granite.

Two caught my eye straight away: Timothy Devery and Patrick Coughlan, both of Clonfanlough, the same townland as our family farm. More threads to pull.

Even this one is looking pretty full. According to the internet, a plot costs €550, not including the interment fees. A plot holds three full people plus several sets of ashes, and you can’t buy one in advance. You find out about it when you need it, and not before.

Margaret, in the corner of the frame

I’m probably related to a good number of the Coughlans here, old and new. And the day before, I got a little reminder of that without even trying.

On that sunny day I’d filmed a slow pan from the far hill. When I watched it back, I spotted something just as the camera stops to pan back right. In the lower left-hand corner is the grave of Margaret Coughlan Condron, the 2nd great-grandmother of my genealogy “excitement buddy.”

Hers is one of the sinking ones. The grass is creeping in from the sides and slowly closing over it. I’d seen a photo from 2002, when it was cleaned. Even then, after they cut the turf back and scrubbed it, it sat several inches below the surface.

And all those Coughlans, in the chapel, in the old graveyard and in the new one? I will, of course, spend the next year building out their family trees. Every one of them is a thread to pull.

Nature does what it does, and takes us all back. That’s exactly why it matters to get down on your knees, wet trousers and all, and read what’s still there while we can.

A quick note on the photo up top: those five headstones standing upright in a line are almost all Deverys. Devery is my 3rd great-grandmother’s surname.

The day started the way all great pilgrimages start: with instant coffee made from the hot tap.

To be fair, there was a lounge in the Airbnb. There may even have been a kettle in it. I just never found it. The place was a gorgeous rabbit warren of stairs and corridors and doors that went somewhere I hadn’t expected. I loved it, but I’d have needed a map and a packed lunch to find the kitchen.

Luckily, I always pack safety coffee. Always. I’d picked some up before I left home for exactly this sort of situation, and that morning it earned its place in my bag. Hot tap, one sachet, done. Caffeine achieved.

The packed lunch was sorted too. I’d done a quick recce the day before (Day 2) and heard that the visitor centre would be closed. Worse, the famously good coffee stand at the welcome centre had shut for the season. So I’d hit Tesco on the way back and stocked up: flatbread, hummus, cherry tomatoes, some sliced salami-type things that were probably more chemical than salami, and a Coke. Just in case extra caffeine was needed. (Safety coffee, part two.)

On the walk to the station I realised I’d never actually laid eyes on the Athlone workhouse. I was very tempted to go have a look. But no. The bus waits for no woman. (Spoiler: it did, in fact, wait. For quite a while.)

The bus to Clonmacnoise left Athlone station at 9am. Ish. Heavy on the ish.

Our driver was a big, chatty man who was getting through as much cigarette as humanly possible before departure, while raving about the coffee at the train station. (I thought about my tap-water instant and felt a small pang.) We got talking outside. I got the usual “You’re not from here, where are you from?”, and once he’d placed me, he insisted that next time I must make time for Birr. Noted, sir.

At about ten past nine we finally boarded, and he waved me into the front seat so he could, in his words, “tell me all the lies about the area along the way.”

He was exceptionally well spoken. From a few things he let drop, I got the impression of someone highly educated, now retired and driving the bus purely because he enjoyed it. Which is a pretty great way to spend a retirement.

Then we were off, bouncing down a narrow country road, me firmly strapped in and him swivelled half round in his seat (no seatbelt, naturally) so he could talk to me properly. I’m not saying I was gripping the armrest, but I’m not saying I wasn’t.

And the lies, it turned out, were mostly about food.

Fish on Friday was “nothing to do with religion”

Or so he told me, with total confidence, before we’d even cleared town.

“It was nothing to do with religion. The church was the early government, really. People in Ireland were suffering badly from lack of iodine, eating a diet of potatoes. Some clever guy said fish once a week would solve the iodine problem. Problem solved. That’s what the fish was.”

The Midlands, he explained, are a long way from the sea and short on iodine. So short that people had swollen thyroids.

“Yorkshire and Tipperary have a lot in common. It’s called Tipperary neck, or Yorkshire neck. There’s a better medical term for it, but that’s what it’s called.”

Here’s the problem with a weekly fish rule in the middle of the country. There was no way to keep it fresh.

“Some people in the inland counties hated fish because there was no storage. There was no storage of fish that hadn’t sold. Salt was expensive.”

His grandfather drove the horse and cart into town every Thursday to fetch the Friday fish. He hated it so much he wouldn’t ride home with it.

“He would let the horse walk home. He’d follow behind the cart. He wouldn’t sit up in it. He would just smell the fish.”

Picture it: a grown man trudging along a Midlands back road, keeping a careful distance from his own cart. It might be my favourite thing I learned on the whole trip.

Spices, mustard and bacon up the chimney

Once he got going on food that had seen better days, there was no stopping him.

“All the spices in the Middle Ages were about trying to eat rotten meat. Spices were not about French cuisine. It was about trying to mask the smell.”

He remembered it in miniature from his own childhood. If a contract worker didn’t turn up on the Monday, “he’d get the same sandwiches on Tuesday, but there’d be more mustard.”

The older people kept their bacon in the chimney, smoked and pungent. “Today we don’t like it. It’s like ham that’s gone off.” To this day he ignores the date on a packet of ham. He opens it and smells it.

And the preserving didn’t stop at meat:

“Jam was only a way of preserving. That’s all it was. Cheese was only a way of preserving milk for out of season. Butter was the same thing.”

Meanwhile, he talked about fruits, kiwis, and wonders why people want to eat them so badly. The supermarkets fly plums in from Chile. “We feed the world and import our dinner.”

The way of the cow, and the old Coughlan houses

When I told him my emigrant line spelled it Caughlin while the family who stayed spelled it Coughlan, he launched into Irish. There’s no K, so C does everything, and an H softens what follows. I got a few pronunciation lessons!

Then came the cows. He pointed out numerous cows and how to tell the ‘French’ ones from the ‘Irish Dairy’ ones. In Irish, a cow is a bó, and a road is a bóthar: the way of the cow. Under the old Brehon law, he said, a road had to be wide enough for the cows. One to graze and enough space for another one to walk by. Now — try to fit a car down that road and you understand why cars here are small and Trump’s insistence everyone import American cars makes zero sense!

“A cow is very important in Irish culture. There’s a great Irish saying: a woman of three cows, don’t be so proud.”

He seemed to know half the county. Every so often he’d give a beep and a wave to someone along the road. Near Clonfanlough, I pointed out the farmhouse I had visited the day before (post coming!) There was my second great-grandfather’s brother’s house, the one with the falling-down roof, and next to it the little one a cousin’s grandfather grew up in. He was delighted.

That set him off on a guided tour of houses of a similar age that he’d tried to buy at one time or another. One lovely old place hasn’t changed since the 1780s. He’s offered the owner 50,000 for it, and the man won’t sell. “He doesn’t want money.” He told me the Irish government will give you money to do up old places like these, so apparently the dream is alive.

The supermodel heifer

And then there was the heifer. A lady along the road owned her, and he had wanted that heifer. She’d been sold the week before, for a whole lot of money, and he hadn’t quite got over it. He turned pink talking about it!

“I wanted her, I did. I’d have offered 3,000 for that. She’s just 39 months old, but she’s got everything going for her. She’s like a supermodel heifer.”

“Oh yeah, yeah,” I said, as if I had any idea what makes a heifer a supermodel. Then, by way of a language lesson, he told me

“If a girl was a bit heavy, it’d be said she was ‘beef to the heels, like a Mullingar heifer’.”

So now I know. Mullingar heifers are famous, and I’ve been given an explanation for a compliment I’m not sure I’d ever want to get!

Clonmacnoise, and no coffee

Clonmacnoise is Cluain Mhic Nóis, the meadow of the son of Nós. St Ciarán founded the monastery here, and for centuries it was the economic centre of the region, not just a holy one. Many of the high crosses you see outside are replicas, he told me. The originals have been moved indoors to protect them.

As promised, the café was shut for the season, so out came the flatbread and hummus. Before he pulled away, he mentioned the next bus wouldn’t be along for a while, and that it’s about 6 kilometres to Shannonbridge if I fancied walking there for lunch.

At the welcome hut, I heard the genealogist’s version of a horror story. A university team had once transcribed every gravestone on the site, then wouldn’t hand the transcriptions over without an eye-watering fee. There was equal dismay as to why the Irish Government wasn’t also doing this. Certainly, something has to have been done… I have homework ahead of me when I get home.

The ride back: potatoes, a rabbit and a stick

My phone was nearly dead when I got back on the bus – and I’d forgotten my charging cable. He offered me his. When I said I live near London, he informed me I was no longer in the European Union, but they’d let me back in if I gave up sterling. I promised to pass the message on.

We passed the little family house where twelve children had been raised. Then he went back to the table. Before the Famine, he said, the diet was potatoes three times a day. The variety most people grew was the Lumper: cheap, heavy-cropping and low in nutrients. With milk alongside, though, it kept people going.

“Believe it or not, they were considered better fed than the English industrial worker. Nutritionally, they were better fed.”

The catch was everything else on the land.

“The problem was the landlord owned the hunting and fishing. If you stole a fish or a rabbit, the sentence was Australia.”

So the fish came full circle. Forbidden from the river on a Tuesday, compulsory from the cart on a Friday.

He had one more story for the genealogist on board. His grandfather bought a field from a neighbour who needed a few pounds to get to America. Nobody had any money and nobody had a solicitor. So his grandfather pulled a straw from the field and broke a stick from the ditch, in front of a witness, and that was the sale. Decades later, to register the land, he had to place a notice in a national paper asking if anyone else claimed it. If nobody did, it was his. He very strategically placed his notice in a national paper….of Northern Ireland. Probably not read in the Republic!

Into Athlone: the pig is committed

I mentioned I’d picked up my picnic at Tesco. That set off a ranking of sandwiches (Tesco’s are “pretty decent” now, and half the price of a café’s) and one last test for me.

“Egg sandwich and bacon sandwich, what’s the difference?”

“In the bacon one, the hen is only involved. The pig is fully committed.”

What a scream! As I got off, he asked where I was headed next on my adventure. Dublin on the 7 a.m. train, I told him, to the National Archives. His parting advice: “No vodka, okay?”

So, was Friday fish really about iodine?

Sorry to my new favourite bus driver, but there is an alternative story about Fish Friday. Meatless Fridays were a Catholic penance, marking the day of the Crucifixion, and they go back to the early Church. Fish got in because it didn’t count as meat. The rule was relaxed in 1966, which is why your granny may still serve fish on a Friday and your kids won’t.

He wasn’t wrong about the necks, though. Goitre from iodine-poor inland soil was real, in Ireland and in England too. The English version is usually called Derbyshire neck, though.

The church and the iodine were never actually in cahoots. But it’s a better story his way, and I’ll be telling it at every Friday fish supper from now on.

Day two was the day it all got real. On Day 1 I arrived in Athlone by train, in the rain, and discovered within about four minutes that my rain gear had decided it was no longer in the rain business. Rain-adjacent gear, at best.

Enter Ankit.

Ankit came to Athlone from Pakistan about 25 years ago and has been part of the place ever since. He gave me a lift from the station to my Airbnb. It should only have been a few minutes, but the after-school traffic had other ideas, and that gave us time to chat.

It turned out he’d taken several family historians out on what he called “local farmer hunting trips”: driving visitors round the back roads looking for the farms and families their ancestors came from. A man who already knows what a genealogist means by “it’s just up this road, I think”? I booked him on the spot.

Farmer hunting in Clonfanlough

He picked me up the next morning, and it was a stunning day. Blue sky, sun on the fields, the kind of weather Ireland produces just often enough to keep you coming back.

We headed out to Clonfanlough, to the farm my Coughlan family came from. Ankit poked at his phone while I wandered up and down the road taking photo after photo of fields, walls, brambles and the remains of the old farmhouse. He has clearly done this before. He knew exactly how much patience a family historian needs, and he had it.

“People usually only spend fifteen minutes there”

Clonmacnoise was only a little way down the road, so of course we went.

“I’ll wait,” said Ankit. “It won’t be much. People usually only spend fifteen, twenty minutes there.”

Ha. He didn’t know me.

An hour and a half later I came back, having done what I can only describe as a reconnaissance mission. I’d walked the site, got my bearings, found out the visitor centre was about to shut for the season, and decided that what I really needed was a whole day there. So I made a plan to come back the very next day and do it properly.

I could barely contain myself. A whole day at Clonmacnoise, all to myself, and I knew exactly where I was going first: the chapel, and the stones inside it. Many of them belong to Coughlans. My Coughlans, quite possibly, and I wanted the time to read every one properly, photograph them and start working out who was who.

If you’ve never been, this video gives you a feel for the place:

Which is exactly what I did, on the local bus, with a driver who had a lot to say about fish. That’s Day 3: All the Lies About the Area.

Thank you, Ankit, for the lift, the patience and the farmer hunting. If you’re a family historian heading to the Athlone area, find yourself an Ankit.

Before the graveyards, before the bus, before any of it: the farm.

I gave Ankit the postcode (that’s what we’d call it in the UK; here it’s an Eircode, and it does a lot of heavy lifting, because rural Ireland apparently doesn’t really do addresses). He punched it in, off we went down the back roads, and he pulled up right alongside.

I had the details of the people who own the farm now, but they weren’t in. It was early on a Saturday morning, and hardly anyone came by. Just me, Ankit, the birds, and a whole lot of green.

How I knew where to go

Here’s the bit I have to tell you, because it’s the reason I was standing on that road at all.

A while back I put a post in an Offaly genealogy group on Facebook. Crickets. I tried again. This time someone reached out: they were researching the same surname, in the same townland. They asked whether I knew any of five couples they’d spent years, and several trips to Ireland, researching.

One stood out: James Coughlan and Ann Condron.

A quick word on Griffith’s Valuation

If you’re new to Irish research, Griffith’s Valuation is one of the big ones. It was a survey of property across Ireland, overseen by Sir Richard Griffith, with work starting in 1847 and the last volumes published in 1864. For each townland it lists the occupier (the person responsible for paying the tax, usually the head of the household), who they leased from, a short description of the property (house, offices, land), its size and its value. Each holding has a reference number, often with letters (5a, 5b and so on), that ties it to the valuation maps.

No wives, no children, nobody else matters as far as Griffith’s is concerned. But we love it anyway, because so many of Ireland’s 19th-century census returns didn’t survive. Griffith’s is one of the earliest listings of ordinary people we have, however posh (or not) their house was.

Two houses, one farm

In Griffith’s, James Coughlan was on a farm, in one house. In the other house on that same farm was a James Condron.

At that point I hadn’t quite clicked that this was the James Coughlan of James and Ann Condron. That James Coughlan was my 2nd great-grandfather’s brother.

And in the other house? James Condron, and a Margaret Coughlan: the 2nd great-grandmother of my genealogy excitement buddy.

This buddy knew the house. They had the dirt on the family from local farmers whose people have been in the area for generations, and they’d been travelling back to this corner of Offaly for 40 years to learn more. GOLD. (And yes, we’ve now met, and it turns out we’re officially related too, if distantly.)

Anyway. I digress.

The farmhouse

The farmhouse is severely overgrown. I had hoped to nick a stone from the ground to bring home to my mother, but there was no getting close to it. Much of the centre of the building has fallen in.

What surprised me most was how small it was, considering how many people lived in it. I took ten paces and was already further than the length of the front.

There’s also a much smaller house about twenty paces from the main one, and another house directly across the road.

Looking at the Griffith’s map, I think the little house was plot 6c, lived in by a Bridget Coughlan. I’m not sure yet whether she was a spinster or a widow. Which would make 5a and 5b the two houses in question.

Walking around it

To touch this farmhouse, and walk around it knowing that my 2nd great-grandparents and their families, and very likely my 3rd great-grandparents too, did exactly the same, was very special. I don’t have a better word for it than that.