Mullingar sits on the Royal Canal, between Lough Owel to the north and Lough Ennell to the south, in country so flat that the cathedral's twin towers can be seen from kilometres away. It became the county town of Westmeath in 1542, when the new county was split off from Meath. The Royal Canal reached the town in 1806 — by fast canal boat you could be in Dublin in eight hours, which counted as miraculous at the time — and the Midland Great Western Railway arrived in 1848, making Mullingar a junction point. The lakes that surrounded the town suddenly became reachable from the capital, and Mullingar quietly invented itself as a place people went for leisure: fishing on Lough Ennell, sailing on Lough Owel, the kind of unhurried country pleasures that travel writers of the time loved to recommend.

South of town on the eastern shore of Lough Ennell stands Belvedere House, a handsome 18th-century villa with one of Ireland's strangest stories built into its garden. Robert Rochfort, the first Earl of Belvedere, accused his wife of adultery with his own brother and kept her locked up at their other house for thirty-one years. Then, because his other brother George had built a grander house at Tudenham within sight of Belvedere, the earl ordered a vast sham-Gothic ruin built across the lawn specifically to block the view — a 60-foot-high folly known forever after as the Jealous Wall. Tudenham itself burned in 1958 and now stands as a real ruin a few hundred metres away. The Jealous Wall is still there. Walk through the gardens and you can see exactly what the earl could not bear to look at.

Lough Ennell has another, gentler claim on the imagination. The south shore was where Jonathan Swift played in boats as a child, looking back at the small figures of people on the bank and the houses behind them, the scale strangely diminished by distance across water. That childhood impression, by tradition, became Lilliput — the country of tiny people in *Gulliver's Travels*. The area is still called Lilliput, and you can hire a boat there. Lough Owel north of town is deeper, spring-fed, and supplies the water for the Royal Canal. Beyond, Lough Derravaragh holds another story: the Children of Lir, transformed by jealousy into swans, lived out three hundred years of their nine-hundred-year enchantment on its waters. A sculpture in Castlepollard square shows the moment they were changed.

In 1900 an 18-year-old James Joyce came to Mullingar with his father and siblings and spent enough time there to make the town a small but persistent presence in *Ulysses*. Leopold and Molly Bloom's daughter Milly works in a photography shop in Mullingar; she writes home cheerfully about a young student called Bannon she has met. Leopold spends much of his day half-deciding to pay her a visit and half-worrying about the return rail fare of two shillings and sixpence — could he wangle a free pass through M'Coy at the railway? Could he just cycle the fifty miles along the canal? The question is never resolved by the end of Bloomsday. A century later, the canal towpath is still there and still walkable from Dublin, and Mullingar still has trains, though no longer the kind that prompted such precise calculations of fares and favours.

Mullingar has a sideline in producing people who go on to become improbably well known. The novelist J.P. Donleavy, author of *The Ginger Man*, lived nearby for decades. Michael O'Leary, the famously combative chief executive of Ryanair, grew up at Clonmel House on the Dublin Road — a building that has been, variously, a townhouse, a bishop's palace, the regional tourist board, and is now Victorian Escapade, a Victorian-themed event venue where guests dress up in period costume. And in 1993 the younger of two brothers was born to a butcher and a healthcare worker in Mullingar. His name was Niall Horan, and twenty years later he would be a member of One Direction, a band that played to stadiums of screaming teenagers in fifty countries. The town carries all of this with the same shrug it has applied to the backwards mill, the Jealous Wall, the lakes that became Lilliput. Mullingar has been here a long time. It expects to remain.