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ROSCOMMON |
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More or less in the centre of the county, there's nothing much to
ROSCOMMON , but it's an oddly pleasant town to spend time and soak up
the atmosphere. Its solid tone is set by heavy, stone buildings - among
them the Bank of Ireland, once the courthouse, and the county jail , now
housing a collection of shops, its serrated top giving the town a
characteristic silhouette, identifiable for miles around. The jail was
the scene of all public hangings in the county and used to have a woman
executioner called Lady Betty, whose own sentence for murder was revoked
on condition that she did her gruesome job for free.
Roscommon boasts two impressive ruins: on the Boyle road out of town,
the enormous and well-preserved Roscommon Castle was built by the
Normans in 1269, burnt down by the Irish four years later and rebuilt in
1280. Remodelling clearly continued for some time - there are some
incongruously refined windows among the massive walls. The other ruin,
in the lower part of the town, is the abbey . Roscommon takes its name
from a Celtic saint, St Coman, who was the first bishop here and under
whom the see became well known as a seat of learning, having close ties
with the more famous abbey at Clonmacnois in County Offaly. The priory
ruin, however, is Dominican, dating from 1253. Amazingly enough, despite
the religious persecution that followed the Reformation and the
Plantations, the Dominicans managed to hang on well into the nineteenth
century, the last two incumbents, parish priests of Fuerty and Athleague,
dying in 1830 and 1872 respectively.
The church in the centre of town houses a slightly higgledy-piggledy
museum of local history (April-Oct daily 10am-5.30pm; free), the kind of
place that museologists are beginning to regard as an endangered species.
The building's striking Star of David window was put there by its
nineteenth-century Welsh builders in honour of their patron saint.
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