County Carlow
Ceatharlach
- IrishCeatharlach
- ProvinceLeinster
- County townCarlow
- Local governmentCarlow County Council
- Area896 km²
- Population61,968 (2022)
- Highest pointMount Leinster, 794.4 m, shared with Wexford
The attack on Carlow
The signal for the rising was to be the mail coach from Dublin failing to arrive. On the twenty fourth of May 1798 it failed to arrive. Early the next morning the rebels came into Carlow.
They marched up Tullow Street towards the Potato Market, about two thousand of them, led by a farmer named Roche. The garrison was waiting and opened fire. Houses where rebels took shelter were set alight.
Nineteen carts took the dead over Graigue bridge, where 417 bodies were buried in three gravel pits. It was believed that no fewer than six hundred died in all.
All of this is from Sir Richard Musgrave, a loyalist who wrote three years later and had no sympathy for the rebels. Nobody counted on the other side.
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Brownshill Dolmen
A portal tomb in a field outside Carlow. The capstone is granite, about four point seven metres by six point one, and two metres thick.
The Office of Public Works says it is believed to weigh over 100 tonnes and is reputedly the largest of its kind in Europe. Believed and reputedly are the right words. It has never been excavated.
It is somewhere between 4,900 and 5,500 years old. How it was raised is not known.
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John Tyndall
Born at Leighlinbridge on the second of August 1820. His father was a land agent who mended boots to make ends meet. The boy went from school into the Ordnance Survey.
He took a doctorate in Germany and in 1853 was given the chair of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in London. He measured how water vapour and other gases absorb heat, which is the start of the science of the greenhouse effect. His experiments with fine particles made a blue sky in a glass tube, and the scattering still carries his name.
The Catholic bishops denounced him in 1875. He died in 1893 of an accidental overdose of chloral, and was buried in Surrey.
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