Where Is Kilderry Bog, Ireland?

Kilderry is in County Meath, in the east of Ireland, and that is as far as the record goes. The village, its castle and the bog beside it appear on no current survey, and the Archive files the locality as SUPPRESSED. The Field Survey marks it as a region only pin in County Meath, roughly twenty-six miles north-west of Dublin, with a zone of doubt around it rather than a point.

What the account gives

The witness reaches Kilderry by train as far as the station at Ballylough, since the village itself is off the railway, and is met there by a motor car. He finds a village ringed by bog, built around an ancestral castle that his friend Denys Barry, an American who had made his money abroad, has bought back and restored. Out on the bog stands a pale ruin on an islet. The people of Ballylough warn the witness against going on, and the villagers of Kilderry have already left.

The reason is that Barry means to drain the bog. The local account ties it to the settlers of the old Irish annals, said to have died of plague, and to a city that was overlooked in the burying, left to its patron moon-goddess beneath the peat. Barry sent for labourers from the north and went ahead.

What became of Barry

He did not come through the night before the draining was to begin. The witness was found at dawn, wandering near Ballylough, and the police of County Meath searched long and far for Barry and for the others without finding him. The Archive's account does not describe him as available for comment afterward. A SUPPRESSED stamp is what this office would expect to find on a place whose owner and whole workforce left no trace.

On the map

The pin is deliberately loose. The accounts name the county and the neighbouring station, and the Archive will not assert a field. Open it on the interactive map and the zoom shows the County Meath coast and the rivers around it.