Walking through Cloonloo in County Sligo

Her name was Margaret Davis and she lived in Reno. She also went by the name of Maggy and her email handle was SageMom. Both of us subscribed to several Rootsweb Irish Message Lists. One day in 2002 Margaret posted that she had traced her Regan ancestor back to Cloonloo, County Sligo and she wondered what Cloonloo looked like. As my wife and I were about to embark on a trip to Ireland and were planning to stay for several days in the vicinity of Boyle, County Roscommon, I contacted Margaret and offered to take some pictures of Cloonloo for her.

So the day after we found my Gallager relatives in Sheegora we drove to Cloonloo, which is only a few miles west of Boyle.  We drove all the way to the West end of town where we visited the Catholic Church. Then my wife drove back to the sign marking the East end of town and waited for me while I walked back up the road clicking away at the sights.

The sign at the East end of town.

Bee at the shrine outside the church.

A Jubilee Stone outside the church.

St. Joseph's Church.

Another view of the shrine.

Inside St. Joseph's.

Plaque inside the church near the front door.

Side of the church.

The back of the church.

Now I'm walking East along R294 toward Boyle.

A mixture of old and new buildings.

The village began on the shores of Lough Gara but I couldn't see the lake from the road.

The entire place seemed peaceful.

That's the church way in the distance.

I saw more animals than humans on my walk.

Cloonloo cow.

Cloonloo cat.

Back home, Crow Canyon turns brown in the Summer. Not so in Ireland!

The West end of Cloonloo -- at the end of my walk.

That was the last we saw of County Sligo on our trip. We drove back to Boyle and visited a Sheerin relative our Gallagher cousins told us about and then we drove southeast along the Shannon to Rooskey where we attended a Ballykilcline Society convention for the next four days.  We spent most of the following week in Tipperary looking for my O’Dwyer ancestors and then moved on to Cork and Kerry and Waterford and finally back to Dublin. We saw hundreds of little places like Cloonloo and they all looked pretty similar. Except the larger villages would have a pub or two or three. Or maybe even four.

A couple of years ago one of Margaret’s children sent me a message telling me that her mother had passed away. She must have emailed the news to everyone she found in her mother’s address book.  Margaret never got to see Cloonloo but she told me that she liked the pictures. I hope you did, too.