Qualla: Mullingar https://qualla.com/mullingar en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:12 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Mullingar https://qualla.com/mullingar Mullingar: Introduction https://qualla.com/mullingar/ An Muileann gCearr means "the backwards-flowing mill," and that is what Mullingar has been called in Irish for more than a thousand years. The story is that Saint Colmán of Lann reversed the wheel by miracle in the 7th century — the same Colmán whose biography, written around 1122, was reportedly so full of marvels that readers fell about laughing, which the hagiographer counted as another miracle. The town has carried that name and that slightly absurd sense of itself ever since: an unglamorous market town in the flat midlands, named for a mill that should not have worked, presiding over a county of lakes and shadows.

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/b/mullingar-wk/gcdb-mullingar-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Mullingar: Town of Two Lakes https://qualla.com/mullingar/ 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. Th...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/b/mullingar-wk/gcdb-mullingar-town-of-two-lakes.mp3 0:06 2 full Mullingar: Belvedere and the Wicked Earl https://qualla.com/mullingar/ 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 loc...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/b/mullingar-wk/gcdb-mullingar-belvedere-and-the-wicked-earl.mp3 0:06 3 full Mullingar: Lakes That Inspired Lilliput https://qualla.com/mullingar/ 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 child...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/b/mullingar-wk/gcdb-mullingar-lakes-that-inspired-lilliput.mp3 0:06 4 full Mullingar: Joyce, Bloom, and the Cost of a Ticket https://qualla.com/mullingar/ 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 cheerful...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/b/mullingar-wk/gcdb-mullingar-joyce-bloom-and-the-cost-of-a-ticket.mp3 0:06 5 full Mullingar: Hometown of Quiet Famous People https://qualla.com/mullingar/ 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 Roa...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/d/b/mullingar-wk/gcdb-mullingar-hometown-of-quiet-famous-people.mp3 0:06 6 full