Category Archives: Forgotten navigations

I’ve just put up a short page under “Lost Irish waterways” about the Mountmellick Line of the Grand Canal. The page contains a link to the website of Laois County Council, which has published a short book on the subject and has also made available the results of a recent survey of the Line.

I still haven’t sorted all my Rockville photos, and I’ll be away tomorrow so I won’t be able to do it then.

One thing I have achieved in the last few days is to find, on the maps, the location of a small canal network in a bog near Roscrea. Lewis indexes it under Corbally, the parish, but modern folk could find it more easily by travelling on the N7 to Racket Hall, on the Dublin side of Roscrea: the canal carried turf from a bog to the east and south of the hotel.

Here is what Lewis had to say about it:

Corbally Co Tipperary A private canal, about four miles in length, has been constructed, from which are several branches, one for conveying turf to the distillery at Birch Grove, and another to the Rathdowney road leading to Roscrea, and partly supplying the latter town; all run into the bog of Corbally, in which is a lake about one Irish mile in circumference. A considerable portion of the bog has been reclaimed by Messrs. Birch, and is now in a high state of cultivation.

If you ask Google Maps to find <birchgrove tipperary> (without the angle brackets), it will take you to the right area, and you’ll be able to see what’s left of the bogs, but its resolution isn’t very high.

Using the (free) Griffiths Valuation map, again seeking Birchgrove Tipperary, started me off (as usual) in the Atlantic south of Ghana, from which I zoomed north to Ireland and in to Roscrea, eventually finding Birch Grove. They do warn you that the software is a bit clunky …. I couldn’t find the canal branch to the Birch Grove distillery, but then I find it hard to tell paths from watercourses on this map. The Ordnance Survey maps (1829 to 1841 and 1897 to 1913) were better, but they charge for access.

Finally,  there’s the Ordnance Survey aerial photographs. You are pretending you are deciding what to buy, but you don’t really have to buy anything (as far as I can tell). It’s probably easiest here to start from Roscrea, go out the N7 to Racket Hall and then zoom in. On several of the views, there are (at least as I see them) lots of blue markings. I can’t find a legend, but I take these to represent waterbodies. There are lots of them, and I can’t distinguish between a drainage ditch and a canal, but I suspect that the one may have become the other as the draining of the bogs progressed.

Apart from Lewis, I have not yet found any other documentation about this navigation and I have no information on the types of vessels used, but I presume them to be inland (ie flat) cots of some kind. If you have any information or suggestions, do please leave a Comment.

With two companions, and under the guidance of the Parish Priest of Elphin Fr J J Gannon, I visited the site of Rockville House on Saturday. The bridge I wanted to see is dated 1765,and it spans quite a deep (if short) channel linking two lakes. The date means this is quite an early navigation. I’ll provide a consolidated account shortly, with photos.