Introduction

The subject of this study is the community of Rossin in Co. Meath. Rossin is not a parish or a townland but an unofficial entity which originated and developed as a group of people living in close proximity, rather than as an artificial creation of political or religious administration. The area known as Rossin borders three townlands where they meet ¾ Monknewtown, Balfaddock and Dowth ¾ and is conspicuous on the N51 mid-way between Slane and Drogheda because, in an otherwise agricultural landscape of open fields and sparsely located houses, there exists a small shop (Smith’s), a public house (‘Mitchell’s’ or The Tourist’s Rest), a chapel, a school house, the ruins of a medieval church with graveyard and, most strikingly, the ruins of an large Georgian mill. These are all located within a few hundred metres of each other, just before a triple-arched humpback bridge carries the main road over the River Mattock and on towards Drogheda, via King William’s Glen and the Battle of the Boyne site.

By far the most eye-catching structure in Rossin is the ruined mill (plate 1). In folklore, Rossin Mill, or officially, Monknewtown Mill, took its name from a man associated with that long gone enterprise, and the area immediately around it, in turn, took its name from the mill. The children of the 1930s, and presumably their parents and grandparents as well, could not remember whether Mr. Rossin was its owner or ‘the wicked caretaker who lived in the mill and would not let the people go to mass’.[1] The exact origin of the name, however, is still a mystery to those who live there today.

It is tempting to assume that the community of Rossin, which lives on as an unofficial but very real place (real enough to be recognised by postmen and taxi drivers alike) was born out of the grinding mill stones in what many believe, based on external appearances, to be an eighteenth-century corn mill. It would appear, at first glance, that a local industrial revolution took place in the area, attracting multitudes of workers from the surrounding towns and districts and giving a milling livelihood to dozens of households, as in a rural Irish Mary Barton. And finally, it seems that although the mill has long been in a ruinous state, the descendants of those millers continue to drink in the pub, buy milk in the shop, pray in the chapel and turn out to spur on Rossin Rovers, the soccer team, at home and away.

When one looks more closely, however, the story becomes less straightforward. First of all, Rossin Mill did not create Rossin, because the name, and therefore the community, has existed since at least the 1720s, long before the arrival of the mill. The mill was not the genesis of Rossin; it was merely one stage in its overall development.

In consequence, instead of merely examining the role of the mill in the development of the community, we have to try to trace the wider developments in the locality stretching back beyond the establishment of the mill itself. It becomes a tale of two parishes — Monknewtown and Dowth. Facing each other across the Slane - Drogheda road, it was the developments within and relationships between these two official units that we must examine, from as far back as the twelfth century at least. It is also the tale of three townlands — Monknewtown, Dowth and the much smaller Balfaddock. What we will see, when considering the two larger townlands, is a shift of focus — economic, social, spiritual — from one to the other, and a convergence of settlement on the western side of the Mattock River where the three townlands meet.

Chapter One of this thesis examines the three townlands of Rossin prior to the coming of the mill. Before considering these on an individual basis, an attempt is made to scrutinise existing theories and put forward new ideas about the origin of the name and the community of Rossin. The main concerns of the chapter, however, are the improvements which were made to the townland of Monknewtown by its owner, the earl of Sheffield, in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, and the shift in focus of human activity to which those improvements contributed.

Chapter Two follows the fortunes of the mill from the time of its arrival in Rossin throughout the nineteenth century. It is a story of mixed fortunes, tracing an enterprise which seemingly enjoyed only a brief honeymoon period before facing increasing hardship in the face of a declining market. The community of Rossin is also followed from the early nineteenth century, a time when it was developing and growing into what can almost be described as a village, towards the end of the century when post-Famine conditions were taking their toll and causing decline not only to the mill, but also to the community of which it was a part.

Chapter Three re-visits Rossin in 1901 to find a community still surviving, though the townlands around had dramatically depopulated over the previous fifty years and the mill had closed due to largely external forces. The chapter is based largely on the Census returns for the area which allow an examination of demographics, social structure, and occupational profile. What emerges is a picture of a small community living in a rural setting, but with many subtle differences to the locality around it.

The concluding section of this study has been subtitled ‘unfinished village’ and the case is made that factors on a national level, most notably the Great Famine, prevented a real village or even a small town, from developing. Had the de-population of the post-Famine years not been so devastating to local communities, there is no reason why Rossin could not have developed into a village of similar size to that of nearby Slane. It had the necessary facilities for people, but in the end it was people it could neither hold to nor attract. Yet despite all the challenges which the nineteenth century posed, Rossin survived, making this a thesis which examines the origin, growth and decline of a local community, but not the fall.

Chapter One

Rossin Before the Mill

The enduring tradition in the area is that the unofficial placename of Rossin owes it existence to the mill. The most popular theory is that Mr. Rossin was the mill owner or the man who built it, and one little girl was told by her grandmother as far back as 1938 that Rossin was perhaps the wicked caretaker who would not let the people go to mass.[2]

Secondary sources have not generally assigned a date to Monknewtown (‘Rossin’) Mill. It has been described as an eighteenth-century structure, presumably in light of its overtly Georgian appearance. It has also been dated to 1809-10, perhaps because of a letter in the Sheffield Papers in which the owner of the estate, the earl of Sheffield, comments on the intention of a Mr. Rodgers to build a mill in Monknewtown.[3] Mr. Rodgers did indeed become the mill’s owner shortly after its completion, but he did not build it himself. According to a lease in the Sheffield Papers, held in Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Monknewtown Mill was in fact built between 1825 and 1827 by one Townley Blackwood Hardman.[4]

If Rossin was named after the mill’s owner, miller or caretaker, it would follow that the name could not have existed prior to 1825. The fact is that the placename of Rossin pre-dates the mill by at least a hundred years. The Grand Jury Presentment Books record sums of money allocated towards filling ditches along the Slane to Drogheda road as far as ‘Rossin’ in 1813. The parish registers for Grangegeeth Union record almost 80 baptisms of children born in ‘Rossin’ between 1785 and 1815. The register also records the marriage of two Rossin couples in 1787. Thomas Reynolds who died in 1777 and buried in Monknewtown churchyard, was described on his headstone as a ‘Rosson’ man. That the name, and therefore the community, was in existence as much as a century before the mill was built is conclusively proven by a lease agreement between ‘Charles Campbell of Newgrange and Edward Hall of Rossen’, which was signed in 1724.[5] This is the earliest known reference to Rossin of which this writer is currently aware (fig. 1).

The argument that the name Rossin and the community to which it refers has no connection to Rossin Mill can, however, be parried by the possibility that there was another, earlier, mill on the same site before 1825 and that this mill was indeed built or operated by a Mr. Rossin, as folk memory suggests. There is a strong possibility that a former mill did indeed operate in Monknewtown long before the coming of the present structure in the 1820s. The name of the place ¾ the monks’ new town ¾ supports this. It was a town under the jurisdiction of Mellifont Abbey with a medieval church whose ruins still remain immediately north of the present mill (plate 2). Cistercians are famed for their associations with milling, and it is likely that as well as providing spiritual services to the local community through their church, they were providing flour from their adjacent mill as well.

Yet if this was the case, why is a mill not listed among the structures in Monknewtown in the Civil Survey or in secondary sources which describe the area at the time of the Dissolution in 1540? Why does neither Arthur Young, who visited the area in 1776, nor the earl himself in his many letters, ever make mention of a former mill in Monknewtown? And why was it necessary for the lease agreement of 1825 to stipulate the building of a mill race to serve the new structure? If there had been an earlier mill on the site, surely the older mill race could have been utilised?

In answer to this last point, one could argue that the River Mattock itself would have been powerful enough to turn the wheels of a modest mill, and that the mill race was only required for the new mill because of its enormous scale. And perhaps neither Sheffield nor Young mentioned a former mill because it had been gone for so long, too long for outsiders like these gentlemen to be aware of its existence. Perhaps it was long gone even before the Dissolution or the war of the 1640s and 1650s.

If the name does not owe itself to a mill, to what or whom does it owe its origin? Does it simply mean ‘the small wood’ or can it be attached to another famous piece of local history, the Battle of the Boyne? Did a band of defeated Jacobite soldiers settle in the area after their defeat, and out of respect to their former leader Conrad Von Rosen (King James II’s commander in Ireland until 1689), name their settlement after him while cursing the name of Lauzun who lost the day?

Yet we should not be too quick to dismiss folk memory on the matter, as folk memory in this area has proven track record. From the last prehistoric occurrence of the winter solstice phenomenon at Newgrange towards the end of the Neolithic, until Prof. Michael J. O’ Kelly unblocked the roof box to become the first modern human being to witness the event in 1967, the locals preserved the memory of the fact that the sun entered the tomb. If they were able to remember this phenomenon for over four and a half thousand years, perhaps they are also correct in stating that the name Rossin comes from a mill in the area which was so called after a person associated with it.

The facts, however, are that the name Rossin is not connected with the present mill and any former mill on that site was long gone by 1770s or else Young or Sheffield would certainly have alluded to it. It may even have been gone before the dissolution of the monasteries.

The mystery will continue until the necessary evidence to completely prove or disprove any of the theories mentioned above beyond a reasonable doubt comes to light. What is certain is that the community of Rossin which overlaps the three townlands of Monknewtown, Dowth and Balfaddock and the parishes of Monknewtown and Dowth, existed a century before the mill so familiar in the locality today. Our attention now turns to each official entity in turn, starting with the parish and townland on the north side of the Slane to Drogheda road, Monknewtown (fig.2).

The parish of Monknewtown is located in the south-east part of the barony of Upper Slane with its centre five miles from Drogheda, the nearest market town and port. The post town of Slane is three miles from its western boundary,^[6] though in the 1880s there was a posthouse in Dowth as well. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1836 noted that the name Monknewtown derives from ‘Baile Nua na Manach’ which indicates the connection with nearby Mellifont Abbey mentioned briefly above. The ruins of the medieval church and graveyard remain nestled between the shell of Rossin Mill and the nineteenth-century chapel, and it could be that this area was one of the many granges (outlying monastic farmsteads maintained by lay brethren) in the locality, the most famous of which is Newgrange. Many of these granges contained corn mills, and there is a strong possibility that Monknewtown was no exception.

Rev. Colmcille wrote that in 1348 the place known as the New Town of Monkland was granted to the abbey by King Edward III along with the townland of Ballyfeddock and others.^[7] By the time of the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1540 when monastic land was forfeited to the crown and redistributed to loyal crown subjects, Mellifont held not only Monknewtown and Balfaddock but also the neighbouring townlands of Newgrange, Knowth and Kellystown and the nearby townlands of Tullyallen, Sheepgrange, Littlegrange, Collon, and Oldbridge. A grant from James I in 1612 bestowed Munke Newtowne, also known by the name of Rathmiskin, on Sir Gerald Moore of Mellifont. At the time, it contained seven messuages and ten cottages with 168 acres of arable land, 40 acres of pasture, 8 acres of meadow as well as furze and briars. No mention was made of a mill, however, which suggests that if a medieval mill ever existed, it was gone even before the 1540s. This would explain why neither Young nor Sheffield were aware of it, but it would equally cast doubt on the mill theory for the name of Rossin, since it widens the time gap between the structure and the earliest known reference to the name, i.e. 1724.

The Civil Survey, which was a ‘Domesday Book’ for Ireland compiled in 1654 to aid the transfer of land from Catholic ‘rebels’ to British ‘adventurers’ and soldiers, tells us that in 1640 the parish of Monknewtown contained 590 acres, and that 500 of these were used for arable farming. This left 40 acres as meadow and pasture, with the remaining 50 acres under forest. It was still owned by the Protestant Moore family, specifically Sir Gerald Moore of Mellifont who owned all of that lordship and other lands in the region. The Moore family went on to become lords of Drogheda.

By the late eighteenth century, Monknewtown was the last remaining Irish estate of the Leinster-born John Baker Holroyd, the earl of Sheffield (1736 - 1821). The local landscape as we know it today developed to a large extent during this century under his tutelage, as the relative stability which followed the victory of William III only a few miles upstream, provided the necessary climate for long-term improvements and organised estate management. The familiar character of the landscape with its enclosed fields, farms of various sizes, labourers’ cottages and wealthy demesnes, became established during this period.^[8]

Arthur Young visited Monknewtown in June 1776 and noted details about the soil quality, the hedges, the roads and bridges; the agricultural practices of the tenants; the rental system, and even the living conditions of the poorer labourers. The disadvantages of sub-letting and over-cultivating the land were particularly described, since the tenants of Monknewtown seem to have been guilty of both. He also went into some detail regarding the management and improvements made to the estate by the earl through his agent. Following a visit by Sheffield in 1762, who found Monknewtown ‘as ill used as it possibly could be’, a programme of improvement was initiated, which included the signing of several new leases. Young describes some of the initiatives:

He declined the proposals of several considerable men to take the whole to under-let at rack rents as before, knowing that the same wretched husbandry and poverty must continue if he did, although it would secure his rents most effectually. He . . . voluntarily engaged to pay for the masonry and principal timber of farm houses, barns, stables, etc. . . . He made large ditches, planting them with quick round each farm. . . . He provided an excellent limestone quarry in the neighbourhood, besides lime-kilns on different farms. [9]

The measures described above by Young have resulted in Sheffield’s reputation as a great improving absentee landlord.[10] However, the ‘improvements’ to the estate were not implemented as smoothly as Sheffield had hoped, as the smaller farmers were slow to take up some of the reforms to their dwellings.

The common farmers, however, prefer living on the ground, surrounded by mud walls, [and] have no idea of the cheerfulness of large windows, but let in barely enough light to do their business through apertures not much better than loop holes; neither has the encouragement to lime been taken advantage of in the degree it might be expected. [11]

In fact, it seems that there were serious problems with estate management in Monknewtown during the 1770s. Although the minutiae of the dispute are not actually given, the Sheffield Papers frequently refer to on-going friction between the tenants and Holroyd’s agent, a Mr. James Boyle. It is worth looking at this period of wrangling in some detail, as it shows the endeavours of Sheffield to get the estate in order, and reveals much about the relationship between the managers of the estate and the ordinary people on the ground.

The Sheffield Papers contain much of the correspondence between Holroyd and various members of the Foster family of Collon in Co. Louth. Dr. Thomas Foster, an uncle of the last Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, recommended James Boyle for the position of agent. He eventually came to regret this when the estate began to experience difficulties. The first hint of trouble we can find in the Sheffield Paper letters comes in November 1774 when Dr. Foster defends Boyle, not knowing ‘his equal in the country’, and places the blame for the dispute at the earl’s own feet:

Pray, don’t lament the state of Monknewtown for I really believe Boyle is doing his best, and I don’t see any reason for enlarging his reward for doing his duty. I leave him to tell you what he has done with regard to expense and profit. But how can he let the lands if you have fixt a price which substantial tenants will not give? My brother, W.F., and he is a wise man of the world [allowed] from last May four shillings an acre in a farm of one hundred and eighty for the sake of a good tenant . . .

Suppose you let an hundred acres of the worst of the land, continue under his care for three years, and from what I could collect from him, he would make an ample return to you from then; show your tenants what might be done with good management and leave the land at the end of three years in a ten times better condition than he found it. In the mean time . . . let off the remainder as well as you can and make sure of wealthy and industrious tenants who will stick to the soil. [12]

Dr. Foster’s son, John Thomas Foster, made the same points the following month and reported that ‘it is generally thought that your lands are held up at too high a value’.[13] The previous April, the Speaker himself, John Foster, had excitedly reported to Sheffield the passing of the latest Corn Laws in the Irish House of Commons which had granted a bounty on the export of corn and restrictions on imports. He proudly declared that, as a result, ‘Monknewtown and all our lands near Drogheda will keep up their rents now beyond a doubt’.^[14]

It is likely that Sheffield, on hearing this news, decided to increase the rents on his estate. The Fosters’ advice regarding the high rents set down by the earl must have fallen on deaf ears, for the dispute remained unresolved throughout the following year. In April 1775 John Thomas Foster briefly mentioned the subject again, stating that his father’s choice of agent ‘has not put forth all his powers’ to address the issue.^[15] That November, Dr. Foster consulted Boyle who assured him that it was through no fault of his that they were experiencing problems finding tenants to take up leases on the estate, and that the tenants they had were refusing to co-operate. Boyle insisted that:

. . . he wished to let all the lands etc. as soon as possible, and that it was not his fault that he did not succeed; that there were two tenants who take what pains they can to be troublesome, I forget their names but he has given you an account of them. ^[16]

Dr. Foster, at Sheffield’s request, went on to discuss the matter with another man, a Mr. Dowdall. Having lost all faith in Boyle, Sheffield became anxious that a new agent be found to remedy the dilemma and manage his estate effectively. Dowdall expressed an interest in the position but when asked what terms he desired, he refused to discuss the matter further until he was more acquainted with the situation. Dr. Foster then took it upon himself to humbly offer his own services to the earl, and assured him that when the hitch was resolved and reliable tenants were found, there would be no problem collecting the rents.

Nevertheless, the issue was still a thorn in the earl’s side another six months later, and in a letter written in June 1776, Dr. Foster remarked that certain Monknewtown tenants were ‘disposed to keep it on foot to have something to complain of, no matter how groundless’.^[17] Since Foster no longer blamed Sheffield’s high rents for the continuing unrest, we can assume that Holroyd had conceded and lowered them, but that the tenants were still not satisfied.

The dispute had continued for at least two years, and would re-surface again twenty years later. In January 1790, thirteen years after the death of James Boyle,^[18] Sheffield was still being urged to install a good agent in the house which he had recently built in Monknewtown. A man called Nicholls who had been managing things, and had recently come to blows with four of the tenants, was unable to reside in the area permanently due to other commitments.

Troublesome estate affairs were an issue which had dominated and would continue to dominate correspondence between the Fosters and the absentee landlord for some time to come. In March 1794, for instance, John Foster the Speaker reiterated the urgent need for a new agent to run the estate.^[19] Nevertheless, the agricultural production of the Monknewtown estate seems to have remained strong throughout. By the early 1790s it was described as plentiful in crops of flax, corn and potatoes.

Yet Monknewtown was not just a farming community in the early nineteenth century. Other activities took place here, one of which was the consumption of alcohol and/or tobacco. In 1807, two decades before the building of Rossin Mill, a Mr. Carolan of Monknewtown applied for a licence. Exactly what the licence was for is unclear, but it seems that another tenant had held a similar licence which he took with him when he moved to another part of the neighbourhood.

I have [had] negotiations for some time with Mr. Balfour on this subject through my sister, but without the least success, and I cannot [ see why ] there should be the least difficulty.

I think you might settle it in a moment by a line to Lord Conyngham as his friend, for I understand the magistrates at Slane decide this business and that there is some tardying here. I am told that Carolan is a very proper person to be licensed.^[20]

If this does relate to a licence to sell liquor, it is unlikely to be the same premises we encounter in the 1850s and which continues to serve the people of Rossin to this day as Mitchell’s Pub or The Tourist’s Rest because this establishment is on the south side of the road in Balfaddock, while Monknewtown is located on the north side (plate 3). On the other hand, the boundary between Monknewtown and Balfaddock may have changed slightly, in which case the letter quoted above would imply that Mitchell’s may have been serving locals since the beginning of the nineteenth century at the earliest.

Regardless of where the establishment was, this is evidence of activity outside farming, and is characteristic of a nucleated, almost village settlement, rather than a dispersed rural settlement, and also indicates that there was more for people in Monknewtown or on the Monknewtown - Balfaddock border (i.e. Rossin) to do than there was in Dowth during the late eighteenth / early nineteenth century. The church, the school and of course the mill of Monknewtown will all be discussed later, but first we must look at Dowth up to this point in order to compare and contrast their differing fortunes.

Dowth parish is situated four miles west of Drogheda and the village of Slane lies three miles to the north-west. It is bordered on the south and east by the Boyne and on the north by the River Mattock. The significance of this area during Neolithic times is widely known and outside the realm of this study, and the earliest period of concern for us here is the medieval, when the Anglo Normans built a fortress here, as they did in neighbouring Knowth. The first castle in Dowth, we are told by D’Alton, was erected by De Lacy who granted the manor to the Nettervilles.^[21]

The manor of Dowth in the mid-thirteenth century covered an area of 1,463 acres or five ploughlands. There were three Irish and three English fee-paying tenants; one English and one Irish ‘free tenant’; and a few cottiers. Dowth Castle, which remains to this day, is a fifteenth-century tower house surrounded by a medieval field system between the church and the famous tumulus.^[22]

With the suppression of the monasteries in the middle of the sixteenth century, the rectory and tithes of Dowth passed to Sir Gerald Moore of Mellifont but the estate itself was retained by the Catholic Netterville family. This would be a major difference between the two townlands in the eighteenth century, as Monknewtown would be held by the extremely Protestant earl of Sheffield whose close confidante was the vociferous anti-Catholic John Foster. The Catholic Nettervilles held on to Dowth despite the uncertainty of their position through much of the seventeenth century, and remained a very wealthy and important family into the nineteenth.

In 1640, Dowth townland consisted of 1½ ploughlands or 442 acres ( 340 acres arable; 60 pasture; 30 meadow and 12 acres of bogland ). The manor of Dowth consisted of the castle, a stone house, a stable and other out houses. There was also a church, a farm house, a malthouse and bawn, a corn mill, a tuck mill,[23] a salmon weir and a pigeon house. So medieval and even early modern Dowth was a hive of human activity, something which had changed by the early eighteenth century.

Although Dowth townland took up most of the parish, there were other entities within it. For instance, there was the village of Craud and the townland of Proudfootstown. In the latter, the Civil Survey recorded the following: a castle, a stone house, an orchard, and a corn mill, all of which belonged to Sir Gerald Moore of Mellifont. Proudfootstown contained a quarter of a ploughland or 130 acres ( 100 arable, 10 meadow and 20 pasture ) which was shared by the two men; Moore and Netterville both held one moiety each.

Compared to the description of Monknewtown parish in the same source, it seems that Dowth parish in 1641 contained the foci of human activity, specifically in Dowth Manor, Proudfootstown and Craud. Geraldine Stout’s study has concentrated on this period of Dowth’s history in much more depth, so suffice it here to say that by the late eighteenth-century, Dowth was almost entirely made up of farms. There were two small mills of course, but nothing else which would indicate a concentration of settlement, such as a place of worship or a school, remained. It was still very much alive agriculturally of course, but the spotlight of extra-agricultural activity shifted to the neighbouring townland of Monknewtown by the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Why did the emphasis shift? Was it because of the penal laws and the opposing religions of the magnates of the area? The Nettervilles were certainly surrounded by their religious ‘opponents’: Gerald Moore in the seventeenth century, and the vociferous anti-Catholics, Sheffield and Foster, in the eighteenth. It must surely be because of the Penal Laws that the inhabitants lost their official place of worship[24] and perhaps for the disappearance of other functions. Having said this, the Nettervilles remained a very important family in the area, lending large sums of money to the proprietors of other estates in the locality and being responsible for the building of the Institute for Widows and Orphans and the school which are both discussed in the following chapter.

The final townland which Rossin covers is that of Balfaddock, also in the parish of Monknewtown. This townland is situated in the east part of the parish and 4½ miles west of Drogheda. The name means ‘the town of the plovers’ [25] and this townland was also granted to Mellifont Abbey by Edward III. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was owned by Andrew Caldwell of Newgrange. It contained just over 325 acres which was all cultivated at the time, apart from a small area of marsh.

Balfaddock is the centre of modern day Rossin and contains the public house and the shop. The lease of 1724 mentioned above was made out between Charles Campbell, Caldwell’s predecessor and discoverer of the Newgrange monument, and one Edward Hall ‘of Rossin’. A valuation of tenements drawn up in 1766 and 1767 confirms that a Luke Hall had signed a lease for lands in Balfaddock in October 1755.[26]

So these are the background histories of the townlands. Monknewtown and Balfaddock had been monastic lands until the 1540s when they were forfeited from Mellifont Abbey and granted to Sir Gerald Moore. Balfaddock became the property of Campbell and then Caldwell of Newgrange while Monknewtown passed to the earl of Sheffield.