Disclaimer & Bowles DNA Project |
A Drive Along The Palatine Road in the Slieveardagh Hills of TipperaryTwo Bowles families lived along the Palatine Road in the early 1800's. Please see The Bowles of Kilcooly for their story. See also The German Palatinates of Ireland for more information on the Palatine people who settled here.
The Palatine Road is little more than a dirt track in Kilcooly Parish which runs for about 2 to 3 hilly miles between the towns of The Commons and Grange passing through the old townland of Bawnlea. The road was named for the Palatinate Settlement established in this area in the mid 1700's by the Barker family.
Leaving the Commons, just entering the Palatine Road
The farms were laid out in narrow strips angling away from the central road. Other families arrived to start other farms behind the first ones with connecting lanes to the Palatine Road. Some of the homes were scattered out in the outer farms but most people built their homes along the road. Some with wider frontages sub-leased their frontage to their neighbours off the road so they could build more central houses and eventually a small strip of houses became the town of Bawnlea within the townland of Bawnlea. See the Bawnlea Townland Map and Its Occupants in the 1800's In the early 1800's this was a thriving community. Today as you drive through what was the centre of Bawnlea pretty much all that remains is the Methodist Chapel now converted to a cow barn and the Cooke house is still standing across the street although it is now unoccupied.
As you approach the Bawnlea townsite today pretty much all there is now, other than fields and the remains of old stone walls, is the Methodist Chapel/cow barn on the left and the Cooke home on the right.
The Methodist Chapel as it was when it had just closed in the 1960's, as it was in about 1990 and as it was in 2011.
Right across the street is the original home of the Cooke family, one of the first of the Palatine families to settle at Bawnlea. As it was in the 1990's when the Cooke family still lived in the house and as I saw it in 2011. Too bad about the stone walls.
And that's about it for the town of Bawnlea. There are other remains of the Bawnlea Palatine townland as you drive farther along the Palatine Road though. The remains of two more Palatine farms on the way down the hill. The first picture shows a wooden fence laying against the original stone wall with quite ornamental posts. Notice the plain functional stone posts in the fences around the Cooke house and the chapel's gate in the pictures above.
Driving farther down the road you can see just how high these farms are up on the Slieveardagh Hills, and you are already half way down.
Finally, approaching the medieval fortified house called Grange Castle which marks the end of the Palatine Road.
Just a bit further on is Kilcooly Manor,the ancestral home of the Barkers who once owned this entire region and nearby the Kilcooly Church of Ireland.
The townland between Bawnlea and Commons is Newpark. In 1777, George Ryall of Newpark and Fethard married Ann Bowles of Killenaule. |