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Town

Broadway Town

Broadway’s small village streets connect nineteenth-century trading life, surviving thatch and the protected lagoon landscape of southeast Wexford.

Watercolour and fine ink illustration of Thatched house near Broadway Town.
Illustration, thatched house near Broadway Town, in 2007
Recorded locationBroadway Town52.22089° N · 6.38824° WInteractive map supplied by OpenStreetMap.
Approximate recorded location · Logainm.ie

The name

A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.

Recorded forms

  • Broadway Town · English · main form

Place & story

A roadside village with a dispensary

Samuel Lewis’s 1837 account places Broadway at the northern end of Lady’s Island Lake, on the road between Wexford and Carne. It had 160 inhabitants and had recently lost its status as a regular post town, becoming a sub-office of Wexford instead. Fairs met after Trinity Sunday and on 18 October, and a public dispensary served the district. Nearby Doyle’s Cross had a Wesleyan Methodist meeting place, adding another institution to the village’s wider social landscape. [2]

A house with an oat-thatch roof

The architectural inventory records a surviving vernacular house at Saint Iberius in Broadway that was already present in 1840. Its lobby-entry plan includes an off-centre entrance protected by a windbreak. Later improvements added a slate-roofed return, while the main roof retained oat thatch with exposed hazel fixings. A Heritage Council grant assisted its rethatching in 2005. The building’s different roof coverings and extensions preserve evidence of adaptation within a modest rural home. [3]

The lake beyond the village

Lady’s Island Lake is protected for its coastal lagoon, reefs and vegetation on stony banks. A separate Special Protection Area recognises its birds and wetland habitat, including roseate, common, Arctic and Sandwich terns, black-headed gulls and gadwall. These overlapping designations concern different features of the same wider coastal landscape. Broadway stands at the lake’s northern end, giving the village a setting connected with a protected lagoon rather than an ordinary inland freshwater lake. [4] [5] [2]

Geographic information

Place type
Town
County
Wexford
Barony
Forth
Civil parish
Saint Iberius'
Coordinates
52.22089, -6.38824 (approximate)
Logainm ID
54173 ↗

Sources & further reading

  1. Logainm.ie — Broadway Town. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  2. Broadway: A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) · Samuel Lewis
  3. Vernacular house, Saint Iberius, Broadway, register 15704856 · National Inventory of Architectural Heritage
  4. Lady’s Island Lake SAC000704 · National Parks and Wildlife Service
  5. Lady’s Island Lake SPA004009 · National Parks and Wildlife Service
  6. Thatched house near Broadway Town illustration: based on a Thatched house by Jonathan Billinger. AI-assisted watercolour and ink adaptation; cream paper margins added, incidental clutter omitted and fine details simplified. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.

Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2008-11-10. How this page was prepared.