Robertstown Tannery

Lately I've been working on transcribing some of the Irish local accounts collected in the National Folklore Collection, UCD as part of the Meitheal Dúchas transcription project and came across this one involving one of the people named in an earlier post here.  A while back I wrote about a deed among members of the O'Reilly family of Kilbeg, County Meath.  The deed mentioned that all the parties to it were the grandchildren of a Charles Reilly or O'Reilly of Robertstown.  This Charles is the subject of the particular local history piece I came across, that of the Robertstown Tannery.

Robertstown Castle,
Photo © Mike Searle (cc-by-sa/2.0)

Evidently Charles O'Reilly owned a tannery in Robertstown, and lived at Robertstown Castle, a fortified early 17th century house originally built by the Barnwall family.

The story about Charles O'Reilly and his tannery recounts the story about his wooden false-bottomed tanning pits (supposedly to fool the tax assessors), something that was also corroborated in other stories collected in the area.  What also stands out to me about this particular version is that this story mentions the existence of four unnamed brothers of this Charles O'Reilly, any one of which could have been ancestors of my line of O'Reillys.  Due to a member of my O'Reilly family inheriting from one of the Kilbeg O'Reillys mentioned in the 1844 deed, moving into his house after he died, and sharing a large overlap in family names between their family group and the Kilbeg family, a fairly close kin relationship of some kind seems almost certain.

For those of you who know where in Ireland your people were from, I highly recommend taking a look through the stories collected on the website.  Many still require transcriptions, so you may find something relevant that hasn't yet been made searchable on the site just by perusing the images, as I did with this story of "Charley beag the currier" and his tannery and castle.