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It's disparagingly said that County Roscommon doesn't have any towns. It does, and BOYLE , although not the county town, is a fine, upstanding example. It's not a place marked out by particular charm or beauty, but there's enough here to keep you entertained for a one-night stopover, if you're not hurrying to cross the Curlew Mountains into Sligo. Boyle grew up around the greatest estate in County Roscommon, Rockingham , and although what remained of the estate was disbanded long ago and the house - in what is now the Lough Key Forest Park - was burned down in 1957, the town is still marked by their ghostly presence. In Boyle itself, the most charismatic building is the Cistercian monastery, Boyle Abbey (Easter-Nov daily 9.30am-6.30pm; out of season, keys available from Abbey House, next door; tel 079/63242; GBP1/?1.27; Heritage Card), consecrated in 1220 and one of the early results of the arrival of foreign monastic orders in Ireland during the medieval pan-European upsurge in spiritual life. In 1142 a group of monks sent to Ireland by the redoubtable Cistercian abbot St Bernard of Clairvaux, at the instigation of St Malachy, established the great abbey of Mellifont in County Louth. Clonmacnois, the important Celtic monastery on the banks of the Shannon in County Offaly, was quickly abandoned, and within twenty years monks from Mellifont had settled at a site beside the River Boyle here at Mainistir na Buaille . The abbey is small and compact, in very pale stone, well enough preserved to let you see how the monks must have lived. You still go in through the gatehouse (a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century addition), and there's a wonderful twelfth-century church. During the sixty-odd years it took to build the place, the Gothic style arrived in the west of Ireland; in a remarkably playful relaxation of their famous austerity, the Cistercian monks allowed themselves to build Romanesque arches down one side, and the new Gothic down the other. Look out, too, for the fantastically ornate (at least, for Cistercians) column capitals. Boyle's big house may be gone, but the earlier residence of the King family, King House (April & Oct Sat & Sun 10am-6pm; May-Sept daily 10am-6pm; GBP3/?3.81), in the centre of town, has recently been restored and opened to the public with a range of high-tech exhibitions. An imposing stone mansion built around 1730, King House, with its pleasure grounds across the river, was home to the family for fifty years before they moved to Rockingham, and it represents the heyday of what was aptly known as the Ascendancy. The original Sir John King, a Staffordshire man, had been granted his land for "reducing the Irish to obedience", achieved in part through violent subjugation and by the enforcement of the notorious anti-Catholic Penal Laws. For the King family, establishing themselves in Ireland was a process of determined and successful social climbing: inheriting a baronetcy in 1755, by 1768 Edward King had ensured his elevation to Earl of Kingston. One section of the exhibition deals with the Famine and recounts a familiar story: Robert King, Viscount Lordon, although not an absentee landlord, did - like many other landlords, after the removal of the corn tariffs flooded the Irish market with cheap grain - find it economic to evict his tenants, transport them to America and use the land for cattle grazing. Other accounts detail the Kings' colourful family history - an eighteenth-century crime of passion and a very public nineteenth-century divorce - and there's a section on the house's use as a base from 1775 for the Connacht Rangers. This details their service to the British Army in such conflicts as the Crimean and Boer wars and World War I, culminating in their mutiny at Jullandar in the Punjab in 1920 in protest at the atrocities being perpetrated by the Black and Tans back home in Ireland. Boyle's civic art collection, with some interesting modern pieces, is housed on the ground floor of the building, and there's a pleasant coffee shop, much frequented by locals at lunchtime. At the other end of town, down the driveway that leads from beside the bridge, Frybrook House (June-Aug daily 2-6pm; GBP3/?3.81) offers a view of more modest eighteenth-century living - as well as a great place to stay . Built around 1752, the house belonged to Henry Fry, an English Quaker (the family may be related to the Cadbury Frys of confectionery fame), who came to Boyle at the invitation of the Earl of Kingston to establish a weaving community in the town. The house has been extensively restored and, although only three pieces of the original furniture remain, it has been sympathetically decorated with items from the same period and there are some fine paintings.
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