placenamesCleristown
Baile de Cléir
Records of worship and education connect the village with institutions serving the wider Rathangan parish.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- Baile de Cléir · Irish · main form · validated name
- Cleristown · English · main form
- Cleariestown · English · main form · local name
Place & story
Offerings in an early notebook
Cleristown appears in a priest’s notebook covering Rathangan parish between 1807 and 1811. Genealogist James G. Ryan found the volume in the Franciscan Library at Killiney, filling part of a gap in the surviving parish registers. A December 1808 entry records offerings at Cleriestown. The notebook combines accounts with baptisms, marriages and anointings, preserving a fragment of parish administration before the better-documented nineteenth-century buildings. [2]
The parochial house
The parochial house at Cleristown North was built in 1877 on a site obtained from James Howlin of Ballycronigan House. Its compact, two-storey design has three bays, a central doorway with classical details and granite window sills. The architectural inventory connects it with successive local clergy and records an adjoining stable building already present by 1903. Together they formed a small working residential group serving the parish. [3]
The school joins Rathangan
Cleariestown National School was one of four rural schools brought together in St Anne’s at Rathangan in 1971. It had two teachers before amalgamation, as did Kilmannon, while Baldwinstown and Duncormick each had three. The new central school opened on 1 July with 255 pupils. Its own history recalls new facilities and free transport for children living beyond a mile, replacing the older pattern of separate village schools. [4]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Wexford
- Barony
- Bargy
- Civil parish
- Kilmannan
- Within
- Cleristown North
- Coordinates
- 52.27840, -6.59326 (approximate)
- Logainm ID
- 1167010 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Cleristown. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- New Catholic Church Records for Rathangan, Co. Wexford 1807–1811 · James G. Ryan; originally Journal of the Genealogical Society of Ireland 22 (2021), pp. 55–58
- Cleristown North parochial house, NIAH 15704140 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
- History: St Anne’s National School, Rathangan · St Anne’s National School, Rathangan
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2025-01-10. How this page was prepared.