| Riverstown Baile idir dhá Abhainn |
||
| Location | ||
|
||
| Irish grid reference G742203 |
||
|---|---|---|
| Statistics | ||
| Province: | Connacht | |
| County: | County Sligo | |
| Elevation: | 74 m | |
|
Population (2006) |
310 562 |
|
Riverstown (Irish: Baile idir dhá Abhainn, meaning "town between two rivers") is a village in County Sligo, Ireland. It is located at a bridging point of the River Unshin (Arrow), some 19 km south of Sligo town and 4 km east of the main Sligo-Dublin road, the N4.
Notable buildings include the Garda Barracks, the Church of Ireland and Roman Catholic churches, Cooperhill House and the Post Office. There are also a number of pubs and shops. Each year the village hosts the James Morrison Traditional Music Festival during August and the Riverstown Vintage Festival during June.
In 2002 Riverstown and the Brookeborough Community Development Association launched the Riverbrooke Cross-Border Initiative linking the two villages in a programme of cross-community/cross-border working.
People
- Ambrosio O'Higgins, Viceroy of Peru, 1st Marquis of Osorno was a Spanish military officer and colonial administrator in Chile and Peru from 1788 to 1801, was born at Ballynary, on the shores of Lough Arrow, about half way between Riverstown and Ballinafad. His son, Bernardo O'Higgins, was a commander of Chilean forces against Spain in the Chilean War of Independence. He also served as Supreme Director of Chile (effectively President in today's terms) from 1817-1823.
- Riverstown is also the ancestral home of Munster and Ireland fly half, Ronan O'Gara, whose grandfather hailed from the village.
- The Irish musical maestro Michael Bowles was born in Riverstown in 1909 . He joined the Army School of Music in 1932 and obtained a Mus.B from University College Dublin in 1936. He trained as a conductor under Colonel Fritz Brasé and joined Radio Éireann as conductor of the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra in 1941. He resigned from the army in 1942 and became the first permanent director of music at Radio Éireann. He was guest conductor for the BBC orchestra on numerous occasion In 1948, he became conductor of the National Orchestra of New Zealand. He moved to the USA in 1954 to take up a professorship at Indiana University and later became director of the Indiana Philharmonic Orchestra[citation needed] He returned to Ireland in 1970 and ran a small bed and breakfast in Cork. Despite spending only a few of his early years in Riverstown he regularly returned to the house where he was born on his return to Ireland. His last visit to Riverstown was in 1997 a year before he died.
His compositional output, although small, includes several songs, and poems put to music . He was involved with the melodies for Burl Ives Irish melodies He wrote the first book on conducting an orchestra.Today some of his compositions are listed in the Leinster School of Music examination pieces
See also
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
This article related to the geography of County Sligo, Ireland is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
