In the winter of 1739, the last Quakers in Newport packed up their lives and left. They had arrived twenty years earlier under a Captain Pratt, sent west to weave linen in a planned colony that the Medlycott family hoped would turn a remote Mayo harbour into an industrial town. It almost worked. For a few decades the linen trade hummed along the quay. But the Quaker community was too small to find marriage partners, too far from other Friends to sustain itself spiritually, too racked by deaths of its young people in this damp climate. They drifted east to Roscommon and onward to America. Newport went on without them, kept reinventing itself, and is still doing so. Today the population is 626, the railway is a cycling greenway, and Grace Kelly's family farm sits on the road toward Castlebar.
When the Medlycotts brought Captain Pratt and his Quaker weavers to what was then called Ballyveaghan in 1719, they were following a familiar Anglo-Irish pattern: import a religious minority known for hard work and sobriety, give them a planned town to build, and watch a wilderness become a trading port. Quakers were sought after as tenants precisely because they were reliable. But the Newport experiment never quite caught. The community had no meeting house and prayed in each other's homes. Their young people kept dying. The nearest other Friends were in Ballymurray, County Roscommon, days away by the roads of the time. By 1736, they were already planning their exit. By the winter of 1739-1740, they were gone. Some sailed for America to begin again. The town they left behind kept the linen trade going for another forty years before it too declined, and the merchant warehouses gave way to other purposes.
Just west of Newport, on a narrow tidal inlet, sits Rockfleet Castle, also called Carrickahowley. It is a stark grey tower house, four storeys of stone built in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, surrounded at high tide by water on three sides. This was one of the castles of Grace O'Malley, the Gaelic chieftain the English called the Pirate Queen. She held it during her years of trading and raiding up and down this coast, and tradition says she had a mooring rope from one of her galleys run through a window of the castle so she could secure her ship by literally tying it to her bedroom. Whether that detail is accurate or borrowed from later romance, Rockfleet is the real thing. It still stands. The water still rises and falls around it twice a day, the way it did when Grace O'Malley was alive.
When the foundations for Newport's new Convent of Mercy were dug in 1884, the workers turned up handfuls of coins and old buttons. The buttons were stamped with the name Pratt, the same name as the Quaker captain who had built the linen colony a century and a half earlier. The convent stood on Barrack Hill, three acres donated by George O'Donel, the Protestant landlord whose Catholic wife had pushed the project through. The Sisters of Mercy opened St. Joseph's National School in 1887 with 211 girls and 34 boys. Seven years later they opened a lace school for the village girls, an industry that survived until the European lace market collapsed after the Second World War. The nuns left the convent in 1977, a quiet end after ninety years that had begun, by accident, with the buttons of the Quakers who had failed before them.
On the evening of 18 May 1921, near the height of the Irish War of Independence, four men of the West Mayo Flying Column of the IRA waited for Sergeant Francis Butler of the Royal Irish Constabulary on Castlebar Road. He was walking home from his own house back to the RIC barracks. They shot him once. He died on the road. The reprisal came that same night: the home of Michael Kilroy, who had ordered the operation, was raked with bullets. Kilroy's wife threw herself over their baby Peadar while plaster cracked off the walls around them. Then the house was burned. The Newport raiding party of four had killed a single man going about his duty, and a single shot had brought a war to a family's front door. The pattern was repeating itself across Ireland that spring, town by town, week after week.
Drive a few minutes out of Newport on the road to Castlebar, past a small lake the locals call the Leg of Mutton, and you reach the Kelly homestead. This was the home of John Peter Kelly, who emigrated to America in the 1880s, and the ancestral seat of the Kelly family who eventually produced Grace Kelly, the Philadelphia actress who became Princess Consort of Monaco in 1956. She visited the house with her husband Prince Rainier during their 1961 state visit to Ireland. In 1976, fifteen years later, she bought the property outright. Today the railway between Newport and Achill that John Kelly's contemporaries would have used closed in 1937 and is now the Great Western Greenway, a 42 kilometre cycling and walking trail along the old trackbed. The trains are gone, the convent is gone, the linen industry is gone, and yet Newport keeps its visitors busy: a Georgian estate on the harbour, a friary in ruins down the road, and a princess's grandparents' farm out by the lake.
Newport sits at 53.88°N, 9.55°W on the northeast corner of Clew Bay, about 11 km north of Westport. The town is on a narrow tidal inlet (Newport Bay), with Burrishoole Friary and Rockfleet Castle visible to the west. Best viewed from 3,000-5,000 ft AGL. Ireland West Airport Knock (EIKN) is approximately 40 nm east-northeast; Galway (EICM) about 55 nm south. The Nephin Beg Range rises to the north.