Street Wise Athlone – Brawny

Athlone Miscellany with Gearoid O'Brien

Today, we are all familiar with the name Brawny because of the fine modern housing estates in the townland of Lissywollen including: Brawny Close, Brawny Crescent, Brawny Drive and Brawny Square, for which a new road, called Brawny Road was developed to provide access. The name Brawny comes from the barony in which these estates are situated.

Prior to this the two main usages of the term Brawny were (1) in legal documents relating to the sale of property and (2) in identifying the old RIC Barracks in Irishtown which was called the Brawny Barracks to distinguish it from the Fry Place Barracks on the Connaught side of town.

In the conveyancing of properties, it was customary to include the details of the townland, the barony and the county in which the property was located.

Newspaper accounts from the nineteenth century regularly reported on the Brawny Petty Sessions, these were the minor cases heard by local magistrates in the court house attached to the Brawny Barracks in Irishtown.

The Brawney Petty Sessions

While Brawny is the correct spelling of the barony name, in the nineteenth century press reports the local Petty Sessions were usually referred to as the Brawney Petty Sessions. A typical, or perhaps an interesting session, was reported in July 1853 when Lord Castlemaine presided and Capt Rathbourne RM, a second magistrate was present on the bench.

In one case Michael Cunniffe, plasterer, was decreed by a young man named Egan, whom he employed on trial previous to taking him on as an apprentice. Egan swore that he promised him 1/- a day. The magistrates awarded 10d per day for the 18 days he was employed.

In another case Pat Early, James McLoughlin, Pat Gaffy, Mary Leonard and Daniel Brougham, were summoned by Mary Scally, for pulling the roof from her house, and otherwise injuring her dwelling. It appeared that the plaintiff kept an improper house in Brideswell {Street], and the defendants anxious to rid the neighbourhood of the nuisance, took this means of getting rid of her. Mrs Leonard, the owner of the house, encouraged the defendants to pull it down.

The magistrates fined the defendants in the sum of one shilling and costs, and the landlady ten shillings, and ordered her to repair the house, disapproving of this means of summary ejectment.

Baronies

According to William Nolan in his book ‘Tracing the Past’: “During the eighteenth-century county rates levied by the Grand Jury were paid on a barony basis. The Grand Jury Act of 1836 authorised the holding of presentment sessions in each barony and the barony was represented at the county-at-large presentment sessions. The barony was used as a Census enumeration unit until 1901 and the General Valuation of Rateable Property [Griffith’s Valuations] …was both organised and published by barony. The reorganisation of local government in the late nineteenth-century heralded the end of the barony as a meaningful territorial division”.

The Barony of Brawny

Brawny is the name given to a barony in the south-west of County Westmeath which borders two other Westmeath baronies: Kilkenny West and Clonlonan and is spread over some 12,000 acres.

That part of Athlone which lies east of the Shannon is located in the Barony of Brawny. In terms of Irish baronies, it is somewhat unusual in that it contains just a single Civil parish, the parish of St Mary’s. It contains almost 70 townlands.

Dr Harman Murtagh, writing in the Historic Town Atlas for Athlone, tells us that “By A.D. 800 the territory to the immediate east of Athlone was occupied by a vassal tribe of the southern Ui Neill, the Bregmuine, from which the locality (and later the barony) of Brawny took its name. The same author, in his book ‘Athlone: history and settlement to 1800’, tells us that “Brawny was regarded as a separate baronial entity from well before the end of the sixteenth century”.

When John O’Donovan was involved in researching for the Ordnance Survey in Westmeath, he researched the origins of the barony of Brawny. According to O’Donovan: In the Down Survey the area was styled as ‘the territory of Brawny.’ It appears from the Annals of the Four Masters, O Dubhagain’s topographical poem, and many other authorities, that O Braoin was the ancient chief of this area, and that his descendants, who now Anglicise the name as O’Bryan, retain a small portion of it to this day [1837]. They do not, however, write the name O’Bryan, some write O Breen, as Dr Breen of Dublin, who is certainly of this family and considers himself the representative. Whether the territory was, or was not, more extensive than the present barony which retains its name, I have no idea.”

In the 17th century Christopher Jones owned about 250 acres just east of Athlone but it was the Dillons and the O’Breens who owned almost all the remainder of the barony of Brawny. However, after the land confiscation of the seventeenth century the O’Breens and the Dillons lost much of their land which went to the Cromwellians: Cote, Eccles and Handcock. The Handcocks were to become the dominant family in the barony until the 19th Century. The last straw for the Handcocks was the burning of Moydrum Castle, the family seat of Lord Castlemaine, in July 1921 in reprisal for the burning of three homes in Coosan. Lord Castlemaine chose not to return to Athlone although some family members including, the Honourable Mrs Duncan, continued to live quietly in Athlone until the 1960s.

The early days of St Mary’s Parish

The Barony of Brawny is co-extensive with both the Civil parish and Catholic parish of St Mary’s Athlone. It stretches along the eastern bank of the Shannon from the expansion of Lough Ree right down to Long Island, south of the town, a distance of seven miles. It stretches from town out to the bridge at Ballykeeran. It also took in the extensive rural areas of Coosan, Moydrum and Clonbonny.

The early history of St Mary’s parish is shrouded in mystery. There is growing evidence to suggest that there may have been an Early Christian monastery on the site of the present Abbey Graveyard. While formal parishes evolved in Ireland in the 11th and 12th centuries the earliest church of St Mary’s in Athlone which, it was said, was founded by the O Breen family about the year 1100, was no more than a chapel-of-ease for the parish church of Ballyloughloe in the diocese of Clonmacnoise.

The church built by the O Breen clan may have stood in the centre of the town on the site now occupied by St. Mary’s Church of Ireland. In the early Irish church, in common with the church elsewhere, the bishops were the pastors of the community, and while the bishops were residing in cities there was a plethora of rural bishops, known as ‘chorepiscopi’. It is likely that one of the O Breens was the rural bishop in control of that early church. The O Breens were a vassal tribe of the southern Ui Neill called the Bregmuine , after which the barony was named.

In the 17th century Christopher Jones owned about 250 acres just east of Athlone but it was the Dillons and the O’Breens who owned almost all the remainder of the barony of Brawny. However, after the land confiscation of the seventeenth century the O’Breens and the Dillons lost much of their land which went to the Cromwellians: Cote, Eccles and Handcock. The Handcocks were to become the dominant family in the barony until the 19th Century when, with the dissolution of the Corporation of Athlone they lost much of their power.

Next article: Cornamagh