  As we move up Summerhill (Gallows Hill) we meet on the left a building which was once the District Hospital. This was first built as a Georgian Town House by the St.George family in 1760. In 1818 Charles Manners St.George gave the house to the "Governors of the County Infirmary of Leitrim" as a hospital and it served as such till the 1940's. |
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Continuing up the hill we come to St. Patrick's Hospital which was erected as a Workhouse in 1841. M.J. McManus had this to say in 1950:"I am seated on a grassy bank bordering a meadow that slopes down to the valley of the Shannon. On the brow of the hill stands the gaunt grey many-windowed building that is now the County Home. Today it is a place of comfort where kindly Nuns minister to the aged, the sick and the very young. The badge of pauperism had gone from it. The outer shell is unchanged , and the date of its erection - 1841 - is still carved in bold figures above the main entrance. But inside there is nothing left of the things I used to know (for I was born there). Gone are the stone stairs, the cold flagged passages, the walls that wept incessantly, the badly lighted corridors, the long wards where the 'inmates' slept on straw palliasses. Today it is a home not a prison." |
| A few short years after its erection the Workhouse saw some of the worst horrors of the Great Irish Famine (1846-48). In her book "The Great Hunger" Cecil Woodham Smith writes of the children: "like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left but bones, their hands and arms in particular, being much emaciated, and the happy expression of infancy gone from their faces, leaving the anxious look of premature old age." (For further information there is also an article on the role of Carrick-on-Shannon Workhouse in the Great Famine on this site) |
Leaving St. Patrick's Hospital behind us we return down Summerhill until, passing first the new Community School on our left (and below that the amenity area), then the entrance to the first Marist Convent in Ireland, built in 1891, and formerly housing Marymount College, but recently sold. At the bottom of Summerhill we turn left and walk along the Dublin Road to the roundabout, where a right turn takes us on a delightful riverside walk back to our starting point at the Bridge.
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