myireland.ie
County Laois · Leinster

Portarlington

Cúil an tSúdaire

the Irish name means 'nook of the tanner'; the English name is for the Earl of Arlington

🏔 County Laois Source: Wikipedia ↗
The story

Settled by French Huguenots after 1691, who were given land here and left their names, their street plan and two churches behind them. The Barrow runs through the middle, which puts half the town in Laois and half in Offaly.

County Laois through the ages →
The history of Portarlington

Portarlington was founded in the 1660s by Sir Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, secretary to Charles II, who was granted the O'Dempsey lands confiscated after 1641; under an act allowing Irish place names to be replaced with English ones, the borough of Cúil an tSúdaire was renamed Port Arlington. Bennet's English colony failed, and after the Treaty of Limerick Huguenot refugees were settled here; the French church was consecrated in 1694, and French was used in services until the 1820s. The town still holds a French festival every July.

Lea Castle, built by William de Vesey in 1260, changed hands again and again — burned by the O'Dempseys in 1284, the Scots in 1315 and the O'Mores in 1346, a refuge for Silken Thomas in 1535 — and was a Confederate mint in the 1640s until the Cromwellians blew it up. In 1798 several local men were hanged in the market square.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Portarlington ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

Castles and monuments within 15 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

Worth seeing nearby
  • Dún Ailinne · The royal site of Leinster: a 13-hectare hilltop enclosure whose vast timber circles were built for ceremonies, then dismantled and burned.
  • Rock of Dunamase · A fortress on a rock over the midland plain, sacked by Vikings out of Dublin in 845. Diarmait Mac Murchada is said to have given it with his daughter Aoife to Strongbow in 1170 — a dowry that helped bring the Normans in. Cromwell’s men blew it up in 1650.
  • Hill of Allen — Fionn's fort · Almu, the white fortress of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. A 19th-century folly now crowns the hill; the quarry has eaten half of it.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.

All towns and cities → · Every town name in Irish · Know Portarlington better? Add to the story.