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It was my great pleasure to launch Christopher McQuinn’s biblical epic, Tullow Through the Ages, at Mount Wolseley Hotel in Tullow, County Carlow, on 16 October 2025.
What a book to launch! You’d need biceps like Sean O’Brien to launch it properly. You could fell an entire army with it. 636 pages of priceless, impeccable, handsomely illustrated local history.
I’m a huge fan of local history. In the academic world, you can get very bogged down amid all the paperwork and the records and the archival stuff that you have to root through in order to make sense of the past. But sometimes you have to visit the places, or know the locality, to understand what actually happened. Every field, every alley, ever stream, every boundary hedge hides a little clue …
Take Tullow, for instance.
I love Tullow. I had an office on the Square for 5-6 years.
Our daughters were at primary school in the town.
I used to play a game when I was driving home from Tullow, out towards Rathvilly. I’d try to strip away all the buildings and streets from the town … to imagine what it might have looked like three or four thousand years ago when the most happening spots in the neighbourhood were the hillforts at Rathgall and Tullow Hill.
You might now know there was a hillfort on Tullow Hill! It’s hard to see, what with the telecommunications mast and what-not, but we now think there was a large hillfort up there, possibly Bronze Age or Iron Age. We learned of this possibility during that long hot summer of 2018 when someone sent a drone camera up to look back down in the hill.
History sometimes hides from us in plain sight. In 2024, I joined Christy McQuinn and his wife Mary for a tour of the site next door to the Tesco car park in Tullow where an archaeologist showed us the remnants of what was once a substantial monastic village running ran up from the Slaney, through Tesco’s, under the carpark, under the playground, and on up the river. In the midst of all this, they’d also found the outline of a Bronze Age hut alongside pieces of pottery from France! Right there beside Tesco’s.
Pieces of pottery. Pieces of the past. That is the joy of history. It is an endless jigsaw, and there is still so much to be discovered. History never ceases. Even when we’re writing it down, it changes. You put a photo of Mount Wolseley in your book, looking long and lovely and yellow, and then you come back two weeks later, and it’s been painted grey.
Things change. Our understanding changes. We’re constantly finding out more about our past, about our ancestors, about the forgotten generations from whom each one of us descends …
And yet, every now and then it is essential to bank what we do know. To commit all the facts and stories and theories to paper, to books like this, so that we have a bona fide record of what we know, or think we know, for the future generations to work with. This is what Christy McQuinn has done with this book.
Chris / Christy / Christopher, for those who may not know, was educated at the Patrician Secondary School here in Tullow. He sat his Leaving Cert in 1963 and achieved 1st place, not just in the Patricians, or even in Tullow, but in all of County Carlow. The brightest boy in the county! In 1963, the year Beatlemania was sweeping the word, Chirstymania was going strong right here in Tullow …
Having won a university scholarship from Carlow County Council, he was part of the first group to be awarded a master’s degree in educational management from Trinity College Dublin. He’s chaired umpteen voluntary groups in Tullow, and he’s a regular contributor to Carloviana. However, he is best known for being principal of Tullow Community School for 17 years between 1989 and 2005.
I’ve been in touch with Christy for eons. He came to my aid when I was writing a book about World War One and looking into the life of Captain Bill Murphy, he of the Captain Murphy Memorial Hall in Tullow. Captain Murphy died at the Somme, fighting alongside Tom Kettle the poet, and Emmet Dalton, who went on to found Ardmore Studios. (You’ll find that story here.) There’s a whole chapter on the Great War in this book and, still somewhat staggering to think that 64 men and women from the Tullow locality died in that dreadful war.
In any event, Christy helped me and our friendship deepened, and before long we were corresponding about poor old Thomas Traynor, the boot maker from Tullow, whose statue stands just beside St Columba’s School.
And we talked of Michael Keogh from Tullow who saved an aspiring young German politician from being beaten to death in Munich in 1919. That young aspiring politician? Adolf Hitler. Saved by a man from Tullow. You’ll find that story here.
Of course, there’s always war and rebellion in history books, and indeed in this book. But history is about more than war and rebellion.
I went on Grand Tour of Tullow with Christy one St Bridget’s Day. What an incredible font he is. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of every pavement slab in the town. We all know people who have great stories to tell and knowledge to share. Too often, we fail to take hold of those people and record their knowledge.
Christopher McQunn seized the initiative. He took his deep passion for all things historical, researched it to a remarkable depth, and published his findings in a book. It was originally over 800 pages, but he realised nobody would be able to carry it if it was that size, so he managed to whittle it down to 636. I have little doubt that Mary was close at hand for the whittling stage.
The book has everything – Neolithic and Bronze Age, saints and Vikings and Normans and Tudors, landed gentry and revolutionaries, the tennis club, the rugby, the GAA, the Tullow Singers, the Rhythm Rebels, the Cheshire Home, the Gardai, the Forward Steps, the Day Care Centre, Mr Johnson the Tailor, Mr Murphy the Butcher … there is no stone unturned.
And all of this knowledge, available for the magnificent price of €35. 636 pages for €35. Roughly 7 cents per page! Crazy prices. But, crazy prices aside, and seriously, Christy, what a tremendous achievement. What a legacy for the people of County Carlow generally and for the community of Tullow specifically. On behalf of us all, I say thank you.
Available in local shops and in store and online from Woodbine Books, Kilcullen, County Carlow.