Mr Blanchfield was warned. His landlord, Mr M'Carthy, had told him repeatedly: stop carrying so much money. The schoolteacher was known to keep ten to twelve £10 notes folded in his pocket - in 1919 currency, somewhere between £100 and £120 in cash on his person at all times, when the average weekly wage of a Cork corporation worker was 22 to 30 shillings. He had been robbed once before. He kept doing it. On a Wednesday night in December 1919, around 11pm, villagers in Nohoval heard two shotgun blasts in quick succession. Nobody went to look. The country was at war and the curfew of fear was its own law. The next morning Michael Blanchfield, national schoolteacher in Nohoval since 1899, was found dead on the road outside the derelict house he had just bought. The money was gone. The case was never solved.
Nohoval is a small village on the south Cork coast, roughly 25 km south of Cork city and a few kilometres south of Carrigaline, east of Kinsale. It sits in a townland and a civil parish of the same name. Ordnance Survey Ireland and most modern mapping publishers consistently spell it 'Nohaval,' but the local usage is 'Nohoval' - a long-running disagreement that nobody seems eager to resolve. The village's most striking feature is Nohoval Cove, a small inlet on the section of coastline now branded as the Wild Atlantic Way, a 2,500-kilometre touring route stitched along Ireland's west and south coasts. Around the cove are abandoned lime kilns - small stone furnaces once used to burn limestone into agricultural lime - relics of a 19th-century rural industry that has all but vanished. The Irish Times has called the cove one of the most beautiful in Ireland.
In 1840, in the lean years just before the Great Famine struck Ireland, a three-storey mill was erected outside Nohoval as part of what local tradition records as a Famine relief project - a public works scheme designed to put hungry men in employment building infrastructure. The mill ground grain through the 19th century before falling into ruin. In 1994 it was bought, restored, and converted into a private dwelling. The same fate has befallen many of Ireland's surviving Famine-era industrial buildings: mills, schoolhouses, workhouses, eventually emptied as rural depopulation continued through the 20th century, then a generation later rediscovered as 'authentic' stone-walled homes by people whose ancestors had been forced to leave them.
Nohoval has two parish churches, reflecting the religious geography of southern Ireland. The Church of Ireland parish church is Nohoval Church, also known as St Peter's, under the jurisdiction of the (Protestant) Diocese of Cork, Cloyne and Ross. The Catholic parish has St Patrick's Church, under the (Catholic) Diocese of Cork and Ross. The Catholic church also supports the local primary school, Scoil Nuachabhail, where the Bishop of Kerry opened a new extension in 2019. Glebe House - the vestry of the Church of Ireland parish church, built in 1816 - was home to the vicar until 1978 when a widow of one of the clergymen bought it from the church with plans to convert it into a hotel. The hotel never materialised. The house remains, like so much in this corner of Cork, a fragment of a plan that almost happened.
Michael Blanchfield was appointed national school teacher in Nohoval in 1899. He taught here for twenty years. Sometime before December 1919 he bought a derelict house about 300 yards outside the village. On a Wednesday night around 11pm, gunshots were heard. The next morning his body lay on the road. The medical examiner found two shotgun charges had hit him; the wounds had punctured a lung and he would have died within minutes even with immediate medical care. The most obvious motive was robbery - he was known to carry sums of money that, by the standards of the time and place, were extraordinary. The cash was gone from the scene. But December 1919 was also the height of the Irish War of Independence, when the IRA was conducting an intelligence and assassination campaign against police informers and crown sympathisers across rural Ireland, and when no-one in any village would investigate gunfire after dark. The newspapers of the time treated the case as 'Terrorism in Cork' - which was the standard framing for any incident of the period. Whether Blanchfield was killed for his money, his politics, or some private grievance has never been determined. The 'fear of the times' that the Wikipedia entry references - hyperlinked, accurately, to the article on the War of Independence - was real and pervasive. People heard the shots and stayed inside.
Today Nohoval is one of those Irish villages that exists more on tourist maps than in the daily traffic of Cork - a name, a beautiful cove, a couple of churches, the converted mill. The Wild Atlantic Way signposting routes visitors past Nohoval Cove on their way between Kinsale and Carrigaline. A scattering of holiday homes occupies what were once farm cottages. A renovated 200-year-old Georgian house sold here in 2016 for the kind of price that would have astonished anyone living in the village a generation ago. McCarthy's Bar - immortalised in Pete McCarthy's 2000 bestseller of the same name about Irish pub-crawling - was put on the market in 2019 for €225,000, and bought by someone with the same idea every visitor has: I could live here forever. The schoolteacher's murderer is long since dead. The village remembers, mostly, its cove.
Nohoval village sits at 51.722 degrees N, 8.401 degrees W on the south coast of County Cork, between Kinsale to the west and Carrigaline to the northeast, about 25 km south of Cork city. The Wild Atlantic Way route runs through the village. Nohoval Cove lies on the coast just south of the village. From the air the area is a patchwork of small fields, scattered farmhouses and the distinctive coastline of small headlands and coves. Cork Airport (EICK) is 12 km north-northeast. Best viewed from 1,500 to 3,500 feet on a coastal track from Kinsale toward Cork Harbour. The Old Head of Kinsale lies 8 km southwest.