In the dead house you are lying, and I'd wake you if I could, but they'll wake you in Loughglinn, Ned, in the cottage by the wood. The lines were written in 1868 by Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, locked inside Millbank Prison in London, mourning a fellow Fenian named Ned Duffy who had just died beside him. Duffy was twenty-seven, a tailor's son from a Roscommon village named after the small dark lake on its northern edge. He never went home. But the song did, and the song stayed, and a monument near the old school still bears his name.
Loughglinn House was raised around 1715 as the principal seat of the Dillon family, extended in the 1820s, and altered again in the early twentieth century. The Dillons were absentee landlords for much of the nineteenth century, content to draw rents from a distance while their agent Charles Strickland lived in the house and managed the estate. In 1806, Charles Dillon, 12th Viscount Dillon, raised the 101st Regiment of Foot from the inhabitants in and around the village - a recruiting expedition built on the assumption that Loughglinn men would fight for the king who collected their rent. Many did. The house outlasted the regiment, and the Dillons outlasted both.
In 1903, the house was sold to Dr Clancy, Bishop of Elphin, who invited the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary to establish a convent. The sisters opened a school where teenage girls learned home economics. They also opened a dairy. Loughglinn butter and cheese became famous well beyond Ireland, exported and praised, until the order ceased commercial production in the 1960s. The dairy fell quiet. The sisters opened a nursing home for their retired members and admitted local residents who were not nuns, known locally and gently as the patients. In 2003 the developer Gerry Gannon bought the convent for under two million euro, intending to turn it into a hotel. The 2009 property crash ended that plan. The buildings still stand.
On 19 April 1921, four Irish Republican Army men were sheltering in a house near Loughglinn wood. They learned that the Black and Tans, under Captain McKay of the Leicestershire Regiment, were combing the woods. The four tried to escape. Joe Satchwell and Thomas Toby Scally were wounded. The other two - John Bergin and Stephen McDermott - were captured and shot after a drumhead court-martial in the field. The local anthem, Woodlands of Loughglinn, was written in their memory by Mary Anne Regan of Kilgarve, sister of Kathleen Devine. Brendan Shine, among others, has recorded it. A monument across from the church, known as Mother Eireann, lists everyone from the locality who died in the War of Independence.
On 7 July 1980, two Gardai - Detective Garda John Morley and Garda Henry Byrne - were murdered at Shannon's Cross, on the road just outside the village. They had been pursuing the getaway car from an armed robbery at the Bank of Ireland in Ballaghaderreen. Sergeant Mick O'Malley and Garda Derek O'Kelly were with them and survived. A memorial at Shannon's Cross now marks where they fell. Each year, on the anniversary, families and former colleagues gather at the stone in a country lane that should be ordinary, and is not.
The Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel was built in 1905 and dedicated the following year. William Byrne designed it in a Gothic style, with an octagonal bell turret rising into a slim spire, polished granite pillars inside, and richly molded arches. It replaced a 1798 barn church that had served the parish for over a century. The lake that gave Loughglinn its name lies a few hundred metres north of the village, its waters shallow and reed-fringed. The Eire Og GAA club, founded in 1984, plays at James Timothy Memorial Park. Two pubs, two shops, a community centre, an ambulance station in the old Garda house that closed in 2012 - this is the entirety of the village. It is enough.
Loughglinn lies at 53.817 N, 8.55 W in western County Roscommon, on the R325 between Castlerea and Ballaghaderreen. The nearest major airport is Ireland West Airport Knock (EIKN), about 25 km northwest, with Sligo Airport (EISG) some 65 km north. From 2,500 to 3,000 feet on a clear day you can pick out the small dark lake just north of the village and the rectangular footprint of the convent buildings. The country is gently rolling drumlin terrain - watch for low cloud and rain showers blowing in from the Atlantic.