The Story of the Blessington Name

Blessington has one of the more complicated place-name stories in Wicklow.

Its Irish name is Baile Coimín, while the English name Blessington arose from an interpretation associated with an earlier church name. The English form was connected with a mistaken interpretation resembling “the town of the blessing.”

The landscape around Blessington, however, is much older than the modern town.

People have lived around the meeting of the Liffey and King's rivers since prehistoric times. The surrounding hills contain megalithic monuments, standing stones and other traces of early settlement and ritual activity.

The modern town largely dates from the seventeenth century.

In 1667, Michael Boyle, Archbishop of Dublin and Lord Chancellor of Ireland, acquired the lordship of Threecastles and received a charter allowing him to establish a town. He developed the settlement as an estate town, building Blessington House and laying out the town around its square and streets.

Blessington therefore belongs to a very different tradition from ancient settlements such as Wicklow and Arklow.

It was a planned town, shaped by an estate and its landlord.

St Mary's Church of Ireland dates from the same period and still preserves features associated with Archbishop Boyle. The town also developed its market and fair functions, serving the surrounding countryside.

But Blessington's estate was caught up in the violence of 1798.

Blessington House was burned during the rebellion and was never rebuilt. Its destruction left the town with a physical reminder of one of the most turbulent years in Irish history.

The town survived, however, and continued to serve the agricultural communities of west Wicklow.

The landscape changed dramatically again in the twentieth century with the construction of the Poulaphouca Reservoir and Blessington Lakes. The flooding of the valley altered the geography of the district, covering old roads, fields, houses and other features beneath the water.

What had once been an agricultural valley became one of the most recognisable landscapes in modern Wicklow.

The result is a town whose story stretches from prehistoric monuments to seventeenth-century estate building, from rebellion to modern reservoir construction.

Even the name tells a story of historical change.

Baile Coimín belongs to the older Irish landscape. Blessington belongs to the later English-speaking history of the town. Neither completely replaces the other.

Together they preserve the memory of a place that has repeatedly been renamed, rebuilt and reshaped while remaining rooted in the same valley.