Bakery lane
is located between Nos 14 and 15 Trimgate Street Navan
Photos: © Navan & District Historical Society
Mark Martin had a distillery in Bakery Lane. The distillery bell rang in the morning, noon and evening as if to call the people to work, but it was really the Angelus Bell. This was during the time of the Penal Laws when Catholics could not worship publically but mass was said in the yard of Mrs. Vaughan’s Bakery in Trimgate Street.
The Portreeve (Sheriff) of the town named Hamilton objected to the bell being rung on Sundays. Mick Martin said the bell was on his property and he would have it rung when he pleased. Hamilton took his complaint to Sir William Dillon of Lismullin House, saying that the bell was disturbing his parishioners. Dillon ordered that the bell was not to be rung during Protestant services.
Report in the Meath Chronicle, 17 May 1978
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The account above is from The Schools’ Manuscript Collection.
(In 1937 the Irish Folklore Commission in collaboration with the Dept. of Education and the I.N.T.O. initiated a revolutionary scheme in which schoolchildren were encouraged to collect and document folklore and local history. The children collected material on people and places, games and pastimes, folklore and legend and a great deal more. The collection can be viewed on microfilm in Navan Library.)
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The lettter below is from Fr. Eugene O’Reilly to the Duke of Bedford, appealing for funds to build a new school in the place where the Banba Hall was. The old school he describes seems to have been located in Bakery Lane. The letter is dated 20 Oct 1851:
My Lord Duke,
As Roman Catholic Pastor of Navan, I beg most respectfully to inform your Grace that the national school of this town has been since its foundation, situate in a lane leading from one street to another, which lane is only ten feet wide and constantly filled with every kind of loathsome filth. The School Room may be called a Garrett, for it is partly in the roof of the building and is unceiled and extremely lowlying, very unhealthy for teachers and pupils.
As a matter of course, it is oppressively warm in Summer, and intensely cold in Winter. It is hardly necessary to remind your Grace that from the impoverished state of the population of this Town, funds cannot be procured to erect a suitable building in a more healthful situation.
Under these circumstances, we are compelled to have recourse to your Grace, to remedy this serious inconvenience, and we entertain a strong confidence that your Grace will build a commodious School and House for this Town and this Parish, and give us another proof in addition to those we have had already, of the munificence and generosity of the Nobel House of Bedford.
The whole expense would not probably exceed one hundred and fifty pounds. The Houses would stand a lasting monument of your Grace’s desire to improve the minds of our young people, by affording them this, the birth of the means of education. I trust your Grace will please to give this matter a favourable consideration.
I have the honour to be, My Lord Duke, your grace’s most obliged, grateful and humble servant.
Eugene O’Reilly, P.P.
Source: Papers of the Bedford Estate, (photocopy), Navan Library
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Bakery lane
