Qualla: Newport, County Mayo

Newport, County Mayo: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Newport, County Mayo: The Quaker Experiment

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wilderne...

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Newport, County Mayo: The Pirate Queen's Castle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Gra...

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Newport, County Mayo: The Convent of Mercy and Its Coins

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 co...

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Newport, County Mayo: The Sergeant on the Road

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 barrack...

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Newport, County Mayo: The Princess of the Leg of Mutton Lake

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 eventu...

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