IMMIGRANTS boost fortune of NEWPORT West of Ireland. A town that's home to European Royalty!

I was on my way from Achill Island to Westport when I passed through the unassuming little town of Newport and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get out of the car and look around.

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I found Newport interesting because, as you can see it doesn’t really look like other Irish towns or villages. It’s spacious layout and broad streets are quite a shock to the system after travelling on the west coast. There’s a railway viaduct, another aspect of the town that is pretty striking. It’s now unused, but makes for quite a picturesque backdrop, and there's also St Patrick’s Church, a Romanesque revival style building.

The reason for the town’s seemingly un-organic layout is that it was designed by a guy called James Moore. We don’t often talk about Irish towns as being 'designed', although you may remember in my video’s on Cliften and on Westport, something similar had happened in those places.
Anyway this guy James Moore, was working on the estate of the Medlycott family, I’m assuming they were English landed gentry. So Mr Moore designed the Quay back in the 18th Century.

The very beautiful river is the Black Oak river. It would have carryed goods from Westport, just South of here, to James Moore’s newly established Quays. Fishing, as you can imagine, is a popular pastime here, so if you are a keen angler, perhaps this is where you should take your holidays. It’s certainly peaceful. You can stay in one of the two hotels in the town: Newport House or Newport Hotel. The river is a very beautiful asset to the town and there are walks alongside it that you can take advantage of if you fancy holidaying here

So back to the 18th Century again and the Medlycott’s land agent, a captain Pratt, introduced the town to linen manufacturing. Now I always, being from Belfast, associated linen manufacturing with my own city, and it seems there is a connection, because some of the first immigrants to Newport were Quakers from Ulster. The town was for a period named Newport-Pratt.

Apparantly the Quakers worked hard, as immigrants are known to do, and as a result the town prospered. So while immigration is certainly a hot topic in Ireland, we can see that it’s no new phenomenon. I mean, a Quaker from Ulster in the 18th Century must have appeared as foreign as a Syrian refugee nowadays. And actually these quakers were in pretty destitute circumstances initially, as many immigrants are. To travel from Ulster to Mayo in the 18th Century must have been quite a culture shock. Dealing with religious differences, language differences perhaps (after all Ulster’s Irish is a different dialect than in Connaught and would certainly have been markedly different then – if the quakers even spoke Irish?) Even getting to Mayo in the 18th Century from Ulster must have been quite a voyage in itself.

Here’s an interesting fact. The ancestral home of Grace Kelly or 'Princes Grace' of Monaco’s is near here. The Princess and her Husband, Prince Rainer, visited it in 1961 (believe it or not – I think it was during a state visit) and they bought the property in 1979. I wonder is it still in the family?
Can you imagine European Royalty in NewPort?

Newport in County Mayo. It’s probably not the obvious place to come on holiday, but it certainly has its appeal.