Qualla: Virginia, County Cavan

Virginia, County Cavan: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christopher Kirk, CC BY-SA 2.0. Some Irish towns wear their history on their sleeves; Virginia hides hers in a milk carton. Drive into this Cavan town today and you find a tidy Main Street, a lake at the edge of the parish, and a Tirlán factory humming away at the southern outskirts. That factory turns local milk into the cream that goes into Baileys Irish Cream, sold in 180 countries. None of that gives away the fact that you are standing in a 17th-century plantation experiment, named for an English queen who had died fifteen years before the first wooden cabin went up.

Read more: Virginia, County Cavan on Qualla

Image: Christopher Kirk | CC BY-SA 2.0

Virginia, County Cavan: A Town Built on a Promise

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Virginia began as a paperwork problem. In the early 1600s, after the flight of the Gaelic earls cleared the way for the Plantation of Ulster, an Englishman named Ridgeway received a patent to plant a town near a ruined O'Reilly castle. The conditions were precise: bring English t...

Read more: Virginia, County Cavan on Qualla

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Virginia, County Cavan: Swift at Quilca

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. What rebuilt Virginia was not military force but a road and a friendship. In the 1720s, the cleric Thomas Sheridan kept a house called Quilca a few miles from town. His most famous guest was Jonathan Swift, who came up from Dublin on long visits and wrote much of Gulliver's Trave...

Read more: Virginia, County Cavan on Qualla

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Virginia, County Cavan: The Famine That Almost Wasn't

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah777 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. When the potato failed in 1845, Virginia did something unusual: it almost avoided starvation. The local Famine Relief Committee handed out Indian meal in exchange for hard labour, and women and children broke stones for road-making and helped build the new Catholic church on land...

Read more: Virginia, County Cavan on Qualla

Image: Sarah777 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Virginia, County Cavan: The Soldier Who Made Lincoln Smile

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Virginia's most famous export left as a baby. Philip Sheridan was born in 1831, the son of emigrants from nearby Killinkere who had sailed for America around 1830. He became a Union general in the American Civil War, and his cavalry pursuit at Appomattox helped force Lee's surren...

Read more: Virginia, County Cavan on Qualla

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Virginia, County Cavan: Pumpkins and Persistence

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irishshagua, CC BY-SA 4.0. Modern Virginia has the cheerful eccentricity of a small town that knows it has to make its own fun. The Ramor Theatre, opened in 1999, is the only professional performance space in County Cavan, and home to Livin' Dred Theatre Company. The Virginia Agricultural Show has run for ...

Read more: Virginia, County Cavan on Qualla

Image: Irishshagua | CC BY-SA 4.0