There is a plaque on the wall of the Church of Ireland in Boyle that sits right in front of everybody as they take their seats. If you have been at a concert there during the arts festival, you have looked at it. It says that in a vault near this lie the remains of “the best of fathers and of men, Edward, first Earl of Kingston.”

For a long time the story in Boyle has been that the King family were buried in the Abbey. Clive Roe read the plaque. Then he went to Dublin and read the burial books.

“Now we all look at it, but do we read it?”

Clive spent 47 years selling cars before he had time for any of this. He was the third generation of a Boyle motor business, and the first generation got here by accident.

The Train Stopped in Boyle

Clive’s grandfather, William Roe, known as Willie, was born in 1889. Around 1905 he was an apprentice plumber heading to Sligo to look for work. The train stopped at Boyle to unload some goods, and a man told him there was work at Sloane’s, repairing bicycles. He never went on to Sligo. He stayed, had six children, and moved from bicycles into cars.

Willie had a bicycle shop and a petrol pump right in the middle of Main Street, at the narrowest point beside Christy Wynne’s. Clive spent 20 years looking for a picture of that pump and only recently found one, from 1946. Before Willie became a main dealer for Ford in 1919, he would go over to Manchester, buy a car himself and bring it back on the cattle boat. The Raleigh bicycle agency carried the business through the war years, when there was no petrol for cars.

Roe’s Garage doubled in size, then doubled again. A compulsory purchase order later moved it back 25 feet to straighten the bend on Elphin Street. Clive’s father and his uncle Alfie ran it after Willie, and then Clive and his brother Billy. It closed in 1999, after 80 years. Clive then ran Casey’s new garage in Carrick-on-Shannon for ten years, until the company got into financial difficulty in the 2009 downturn, and finished up as a sales manager in Sligo. He has been retired four years now, and enjoying it.

One Page That Became 24

In retirement Clive noticed, almost by chance, that the church was coming up on 250 years. The parish decided to mark it by restoring the organ, a Telford and Telford instrument over 150 years old that came to Boyle second hand from Christ Church in Derry. The Solstice Choir held a fundraiser, people gave what they could, and the county council came through with the rest. It was finished just before Christmas, in time for the anniversary service, where the rector played it.

Clive’s plan was to put together a single A4 page to hand out on the day.

“Little did I know that it turned into 24 pages.”

The more he found out about the organ, the more he found out about the building, and then the town. The booklet took the best part of six months, mostly in the darker evenings. There is only so much TV you can watch, he says.

The Original Vestry Book

The highlight was the original vestry book, going back to 1765, in the church library in Dublin. The handwriting was difficult and the letter s was written as an f, so every line needed reading two or three times. He photographed every page on his iPad, hundreds of them, and read them at home cast onto the television.

A lot of those minutes are about repairing the church: damp, roof timbers, the battlements on the tower. In 2014, under the late Michael Archer, the whole roof was replaced, after a conservation assessment by Hamilton Young Architects and with the work done by Joe Sweeney and Sons. Inside the entrance, a winding stone staircase runs to the top of the tower. That is how Shannonside got its aerial up there: a man at the top, a rope dropped down.

Foundlings at the Church Gate

The records were never only about the building. On a Sunday morning in hard times there could be children tied to the railings of the church gate. They were called foundlings, left by parents who could not feed them, somewhere they would be found. The church fed and educated them and tried to bring them to a point where they could look after themselves.

“It’s not just about a building.”

There were famines long before the Great Famine. In 1739 to 1741, Clive says, a terrible frost and the famine that followed killed half a million people. For most people in Boyle, for most of its history, it was a struggle to put food on the table and something in the fire.

At Least Seven in the Vault

The oldest known burial in the graveyard is from 1774: Rev John Byrne, rector of Kilcorkey near Ballinagare, just outside Frenchpark. Clive has found his grave. He now has over 1,000 names on a database from that graveyard alone, much of it built on handwritten records kept by the late Sandra McCrann.

It was during this work that he started to doubt the old story about the Abbey. He has been talking it over with Thomas Campbell, the historian at King House.

“Proof is one thing and folklore is another.”

The church’s burial book records Lord Kingston’s burial on 16 November 1797, with a line that is hard to forget: “than whom no person was more to be esteemed or more to be lamented.”

Then Clive found an old account of the funeral of Lord Lorton, interred in the church of Boyle at four o’clock in the morning, the family’s long custom being to bury by night. The church was hung in black, and the remains were carried down to the vault and laid beside Viscountess Lorton. The account lists who was already there: the first Earl and Countess of Kingston, two daughters who died young, Eleanor and Louisa King, and an infant of the King-Harman family of Newcastle, Co. Longford.

That makes at least seven, by his reading. The vault lies under the church itself, below the stained glass windows at the back, under where the communion table stands. Years ago it was raided, Clive believes by people looking for the ceremonial sword and coronet an earl would have been buried with. The Egan brothers, Pat and Jim, bricked it up, and it has been closed since. Before that, the late Dick McGee pushed his hand through the window with a torch in the other, and waited a week or two for the prints to come back from the lab. You can just about make it out. It is in the booklet.

The names do not help. When every generation has another Edward, you think you have found your man and it is a different Edward entirely. And many of the parish record books were sent back to Dublin and lost in 1922.

Assylin, the Annals and Three Tunnels

Christianity in Boyle started out at Assylin, which Clive says was another name for the town, and goes back to Saint Patrick and Saint Attracta. The oldest building still lived in is Frybrook, he thinks, built for the Fry family, who came at the invitation of the Kings to bring flax to the area. Their mausoleum is at Assylin.

He has read both the Annals of Lough Key and the Annals of Boyle, kept on Trinity Island by a branch of the Boyle Abbey monks. A whole year might get one line. A terrible frost lasting until summer, then famine in the land, and nothing about the thousands who died.

Then there are the tunnels. The talk is of three out of the Abbey, one of them to Assylin. Older people told Clive the railway builders cut through one in the 1860s, and that if you walk the line from the station towards Dublin you will come to what looks like the mouth of a cave. He has never gone to look. The idea, he says, was escape: the monks’ writings and handmade religious goods were precious, and three tunnels meant a way out whichever side an attack came from.

You’ll Always See Something New

A lot of Boyle’s history is in plain view. At Lough Key most people turn in at the modern entrance and never notice the old one, a hundred yards on towards Carrick, where the Tiara Lodge still stands, named for its shape. King House was nearly lost to a car park before the county council rescued it. The bridge at the convent gate, built in the early 1800s, was Boyle’s first bypass. Before it, the only crossing of the Boyle River was the Abbeytown bridge, dating back to the 1200s. Carlo has read that the monks charged a toll there, and Clive found a book in the library with Dick McGee’s picture of the old bridge, showing the uprights of the toll gates.

Thousands of Photographs, and None Printed

History only survives if somebody writes it down or takes a photograph. Dick McGee recorded things that are gone now, and his son Brendan still has undeveloped film of his.

“Now today, we’ve thousands and thousands of photographs on our phone, and we don’t print one.”

From 400 to 25

The two wings that make the church a cruciform were added in the 1800s, when the army attended and up to 400 people might be there on a Sunday. Now they struggle to get 25.

Clive puts it partly down to everyone being in a rush, and COVID didn’t help. He has friends in London who go to the Catholic church in Boyle when they are home and follow its service online the rest of the time. People are more educated now, he says, they question things and make up their own minds. Many never came back after online services became normal, and the buildings still cost money to heat, light and insure. It is donations and vocations, and both are falling.

He is not all gloom about it. For nearly 20 years the church has been part of the Boyle Arts Festival, and Tommy Fleming played the Catholic church recently. The centrefold of Clive’s booklet is Veronica O’Connor’s photograph of Donald and Dot O’Connor at the 2023 festival, and people keep telling him how striking it is.

“It’ll always be a church building.”

Chipping Away

The booklet was launched at the anniversary service. The bishop came, the school children did a piece, and the church choir sang. Carlo’s night photograph of the church is on the front cover and Clive’s daughter Shelley’s drone shot of the new roof is on the back. He has sold over 300 copies, not bad for a small town and a niche subject.

He has no plans for another. He had no plan for this one either. For now he is typing up the graveyard, with one finger, and following whatever rabbit hole opens next.