Athy, Ireland Summary

On the border with County Laois, five miles north of Kilkea, close to the point where the Grand Canal meets the River Barrow, sits ATHY (rhymes with sty, emphasis on the last syllable), one of those places where a bucketful of imagination is required to envisage it as it once was: prosperity has turned a formerly handsome Georgian town with a fine main square into something much more ramshackle. Georgian fanlights sit oddly with a bizarre modern church: the latter is apparently supposed to make reference to a dolmen, although the Sydney Opera House seems a stronger influence. Athy’s designation as a heritage town, however, is bringing its historical resonances to life. By the riverside stands the square tower of the fifteenth-century White’s Castle, built by Sir John Talbot, Viceroy of Ireland, to protect the ford across the River Barrow and the inhabitants of the Pale from the dispossessed Irish beyond. The early eighteenth-century town hall houses a heritage centre (March-Oct Mon-Sat 10am-6pm, Sun 2-6pm; Nov-Feb Mon-Sat 11am-5pm; £2/€.54), with a comprehensive exhibition covering the Famine, the 1798 Rebellion, the part played by Athy men in World War I, and the life of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who came from nearby Kilkea. The town hall is also where you’ll find the tourist office (same times). Aside from some leisurely strolls along the Grand Canal and visiting the heritage centre, the town’s unlikely to detain you for too long – except to eat or stay at Tonlegee House (tel 0507/31473, tonlegeehouse@eircom.net; £70-90/€88.88-114.28; restaurant closed Sun & Mon), signposted off the Kilkenny road, a solidly built mansion that surveys the countryside just beyond Athy’s suburban sprawl and has a restaurant noted for its imaginative menu.