Cnoc Loinge — the hill of the encampment
Eighteen centuries of it, as far as anyone can show. Every entry below says where it comes from, and says plainly when the answer is "the story goes" rather than "the record shows".
The older name for this hill has nothing to do with encampments. It is Druim Damhghaire — the Ridge of the Oxen — and it is the name the place carries in the early literature, before the one on the signposts today.
The two names sit on top of one another, which is why the village can be explained twice and both explanations be repeated locally without either being wrong.
Source — Knocklong, Wikipedia
The name in use today, Cnoc Loinge, is read as the Hill of the Encampment. The tradition behind it is that the high king Cormac mac Airt pitched his camp here when he invaded Munster in the third century, and that the druid Mug Ruith helped defeat his forces.
There is a second reading of the same words. Cnoc Loinge has also been translated as the Hill of the Ships — the tents ranged along the ridge looking like ships under sail.
This belongs to the literature rather than the record. It is a story about the hill that has been told for a very long time, which is a different thing from a thing that can be shown to have happened.
Source — Knocklong, Wikipedia
A second account attaches to the same hill about four hundred years later: Dioma, King of Thomond, stopping the Connacht men from recovering County Clare — a battle said to have secured Clare for the Dalcassians.
Source — Knocklong, Wikipedia
The castle standing over the village is a square tower house, built on the hill with the views that made the position worth holding. It was the principal seat of the O'Hurleys, and it is theirs through the whole of its working life.
Sources — Knocklong, Wikipedia; Castles of Munster: Knocklong (Geograph)
In the 1930s the Irish Folklore Commission had schoolchildren across the country write down what their families told them. The Knocklong school — Cnoc Luinge, roll number 11665 — recorded an account of Dermot O'Hurley being surprised at his dwelling at Knocklong Castle, tortured with his bare feet in iron boots filled with boiling oil, and then hanged, drawn and quartered.
The Schools' Collection is a record of what was believed and told in a parish in the 1930s, and that is exactly what makes it valuable. It is not a record of what happened in the 1580s. Historians generally place Archbishop Dermot O'Hurley's origins elsewhere in County Limerick. Both things can be printed here honestly as long as neither is dressed up as the other.
Source — Knocklong Castle, The Schools' Collection, dúchas.ie (collector: Siobhán Ní Néill, teacher)
The castle was held by Sir Morris Hurley until his estate was confiscated by the Cromwellian government in 1655. That is the end of the O'Hurleys as the people who owned the hill.
The title outlived the land. A Baronet of Knocklong still existed a generation later — Sir William Hurly, third baronet, from 1684 to 1691.
Source — Knocklong, Wikipedia
Knocklong station opened on 17 March 1849, on the Great Southern & Western Railway's main line between Dublin and Cork, just south of Limerick Junction.
It is worth pausing on the date, because everything else on this page for the next century runs through that platform. A village on a main line is a different place from a village off one — and seventy years later it is precisely because the Cork train stopped here that Knocklong ends up in the national story twice inside twelve months.
Source — Knocklong, EireTrains
Seán Hogan was being taken by train to Cork under guard by four armed RIC men. It was his eighteenth birthday. When the train stopped at Knocklong, his comrades were waiting on the platform.
The rescue party was three of the Third Tipperary Brigade — Seán Treacy, Dan Breen and Séumas Robinson — together with five men of the Galtee Battalion of the East Limerick Brigade. In the fighting in the carriage, Sergeant Peter Wallace and Constable Michael Enright were killed. Treacy and Breen were both seriously wounded.
Hogan came off the train still handcuffed. The irons were cut off him in the village — in the local butcher's shop, by Seán Lynch. It is the detail that keeps the whole thing anchored to this village rather than to a map reference.
Sources — Rescue at Knocklong, Wikipedia; "100 years ago: Seán Hogan rescued at Knocklong", History Ireland; Rescue at Knocklong, Third Tipperary Brigade Memorial; Hogan's RIC handcuffs are held by the National Museum of Ireland
A year and three days after the rescue, the creamery workers took the creamery. On 16 May 1920 the workers at the Knocklong creamery — owned by the Cleeves group — deposed the general manager, Riordan, ran up a red flag over the central plant, and hung out a banner.
We make butter, not profits. Knocklong Creamery Soviet.
It was not a shutdown, and that is the part worth understanding. They kept making butter. Contracts to sell it had been arranged before the takeover, deals were made with the local farmers so the milk kept arriving, and twelve satellite creameries came out with them.
It lasted five days. The workers stood down on 22 May having won a pay rise, shorter hours, and the removal of the manager.
Sources — "Red flag — An Irishman's Diary on the Irish soviets", The Irish Times; "Red Flag Times", Jacobin; Limerick Soviet, Wikipedia
CIÉ closed Knocklong to passengers in March 1977, one hundred and twenty-eight years after it opened.
The signal cabin outlived the passengers by another eleven years. It stayed in use until 1988, when the mechanical signalling on the line was replaced with modern CTC, and was taken away afterwards. The concrete goods shed on the down side — an unusual thing to build a goods shed out of — is still there.
Source — Knocklong, EireTrains
The population recorded at the 2016 census was 256.
Which is the number to hold in your head reading everything above it.
Source — Knocklong, Wikipedia
William Coffey, recipient of the Victoria Cross, is listed among the people associated with Knocklong. — Knocklong, Wikipedia
This page is built from published sources and nothing else — no filling in the gaps from memory. If you know a date, a name or a correction, and especially if you can point at where it is written down, put it on the noticeboard and it will go in.
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