Dunmanway
| Dunmanway Irish: Dúnmaonmhuí | |
| County Cork | |
|---|---|
 Statue of Sam Maguire in Dunmanway | |
| Location | |
| Location: | 51°43’15"N, 9°6’46"W |
| Data | |
| Population: | 1,655 (2016) |
| Dialling code: | 023 |
| Local Government | |
| Website: | visitdunmanway.ie |
Dunmanway is a small market town in County Cork. It is the geographical centre of the region known as 'West Cork'.
The town centre is built on and around two rivers, which are tributaries of the larger River Bandon, which passes by at the east end of the town.
The population of Dunmanway at the 20161 census was 1,655.
Name
The name of the town when rendered into the Gaelic language is usually Dúnmaonmhuí,[1] but it has been assigned an official Irish name as Dún Mánmhaí.[2]
There is disagreement over the meaning and origin of the name. Some sources list its meaning as "Castle of the yellow river" or "Castle on the little plain" or "Fort of the gables (or pinnacles)" or "Fort of the yellow women".
History
Eary settlement in the area is attested by a Bronze Age trumpet found here and now held in the British Museum.[3]
From the mid-13th to the late 17th century the surrounding districts of the town of Dunmanway were included in the territory of the MacCarthy Clan.[4]
Dunmanway Castle once stood on a bank of the Sally River on the left-hand side of present-day Castle Street. It was one of the chief residences of the MacCarthy Lords of Gleannacroim, cousins of the MacCarthy Reagh sept. Dating from the late 15th century, the tower house is recorded to have been built by Catherine Fitzgerald. There was likely to have been a small settlement in the environs of the castle.
19th-century references date the founding of Dunmanway to the late 17th century, when the Crown settled a colony there to provide a resting place for troops marching between Bandon and Bantry. By 1700, about thirty families lived in the town.
Sir Richard Cox, Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1703 to 1707, was the town's most important early patron. In 1693, Cox obtained a grant from King William III to hold market days and fairs in the town and strongly encouraged the development of the local flax industry. To that end, Cox imported artisans from Ulster to teach the required skills. He sponsored numerous incentives for local residents involved in making linen, including rent-free housing for top producers, bonuses for efficient labourers, rewards for schoolgirls who showed strong loom skills, and production contests with generous prizes. In 1735, the town consisted of forty houses and two to three hundred people. By 1747, the linen industry was well established, and Cox's personal census recorded 557 people. Two years later, it rose to 807.[5]
Protective duties on linen were removed in 1827.[6]
In 1837, Samuel Lewis's 'Topographical Dictionary of Ireland' recorded a population of 2,738. It also recorded the town's changing economic fortunes:
"The manufacture of linen continued to flourish for some years, but at present there are very few looms at work. A porter and ale brewery, established in 1831, produces 2,600 barrels annually; there are also two tanyards and two boulting-mills, the latter capable of grinding annually 15,000 bags of flour, and there are two or three smaller mills in the vicinity. Since 1810 a considerable trade in corn has been carried on."
West Cork was hit hard by the Great Famine of the 1840s. A letter from the women of The Dunmanway Indian Meal Ladies' Committee addressed to the "Ladies of America" was even read on 9 February 1847 at a famine relief meeting in Washington, D.C. chaired by America's Vice-President, George M Dallas.
"Oh! that our American sisters could see the labourers on our roads, able-bodied men, scarcely clad, famishing with hunger, with despair in their once cheerful faces, staggering at their work ... oh! that they could see the dead father, mother or child, lying coffinless and hear the screams of the survivors around them, caused not by sorrow, but by the agony of hunger."
In the early 1850s, following the migrations and evictions which characterized the famine's upheavals, more than seventy percent of Dunmanway residents did not own any land.[7]
On 28 November 1920, during the Irish War of 1919–1921, seventeen British Auxiliary Division troops were killed by the Irish Republican Army at the Kilmichael Ambush (near Dunmanway). The subsequent sacking and burning of the city of Cork by a unit of the Auxiliaries is thought to be linked to the Kilmichael Ambush. On 15 December 1920, an Auxiliary shot dead the local priest, Canon Magner, for refusing to toll his church's bells on Armistice Day; a local boy, Tadhg Crowley, was also killed in an apparently random incident. There were numerous other actions in and around Dunmanway during the rebellion. Even after a truce was declared in July 1921, the local IRA murdered a number of alleged informers. Controversy continues in particular over the killing of ten Protestant men of the area, including three residents of Dunmanway in the spring of 1922, known as the Dunmanway killings.
Culture
The Ballabuidhe Festival is held annually over the August Bank Holiday weekend and centres around both the Ballabuidhe Horse Fair and Ballabuidhe Races.[8] The Ballabuidhe Horse Fair dates back to 1615, when King James I granted Randal Óg Hurley a charter to hold a fair at Béal Átha Buidhe on the River Bandon.[9]
The Dunmanway Agricultural Show, first held in 1946, takes place on the first Sunday in July each year, and with contested classes including horses, cattle and horticulture.[10]
Sport
- Football: Dunmanway Town
- Gaelic games: Dohenys GAA
Dunmanway Town FC made national news in 2009 when Liverpool F.C. agreed to visit Dunmanway to play Town in a pre-season friendly on 6 August 2009. Liverpool fielded players from their reserve and youth teams and the home side supplemented their line-up with a number of players from prominent Cork-based clubs like Avondale United F.C. and Cobh Ramblers F.C.) Liverpool won the game by one goal to nil in front of 6,800 fans
- Angling: The stretch of the River Bandon which flows east through Dunmanway holds brown trout, sea trout and salmon.[11]
- Other sports: rugby union, athletics, pitch and putt and badminton.
Road bowling is popular locally.
Dunmanway has an indoor heated swimming pool with a 25-metre pool: the only public swimming pool in the West Cork area.
Local lore
A later scion of the Cox family, Richard, heard that a preacher allied to John Wesley was due to visit the town and decided to give him a ducking in the local lake. To practice he went out in a boat but fell into the water and was drowned. The event was commemorated by the following verse:
Tis there the lake is,
Where the duck and the drake is,
And 'tis there the crane can have his fine feed of frogs.
When night come's round it,
The spirits surround it,
For in it was drownded Sir Richard Cox.
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Dunmanway) |
References
- ↑ Ó Coileáin, Barra (2004). "Chairman's Address". Dunmanway Doings 1 (1): v.
- ↑ Dún Mánmhaí / Dunmanway: Placenames Database of Ireland
- ↑ Trumpet - late Bronze Age: British Museum Collection
- ↑ Lewis, Samuel (1837). A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland. Lewis. https://www.libraryireland.com/topog/D/Dunmanway-East-Carbery-Cork.php.
- ↑ Burke, Terence (1974). "County Cork in the Eighteenth Century". Geographical Review (American Geographical Society) 64 (1): 61–81. doi:10.2307/213794.
- ↑ Cousens, S.H. (1960). "The Regional Pattern of Emigration during the Great Irish Famine, 1846-51". Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers) (Blackwell Publishing) 28 (28): 119–134. doi:10.2307/621118.
- ↑ Cousens, S.H. (1961). "Emigration and Demographic Change in Ireland, 1851-1861". The Economic History Review 14 (2): 275–288. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0289.1961.tb00051.x.
- ↑ Ballabuidhe Races
- ↑ "Fanlobbus Parish (Dunmanway)". http://www.dunmanwayhistoricalassociation.com/post/Fanlobus-Parish-(Dunmanway).aspx.
- ↑ Irish Shows Association
- ↑ "Dunmanway Salmon & Trout Anglers Association". http://www.dunmanwaysalmonandtroutanglersassociation.com/index.html.
