Life in Cooley
On the 1st of September 1964, as I approached my 13th birthday I put on my first pair of long trousers and headed off to boarding school in Monaghan. While I returned home for holidays, including the long three month Summer breaks, that was when, in reality, I left my childhood home in Castletowncooley, in north County Louth. We always refer to it as Cooley for short. I didn’t feel this departure at the time and I had a choice about going to boarding school or travelling on a daily basis to school in Dundalk but I suppose that is just a part of growing up. We still own the house and pre-Covid I would have visited on a weekly basis, so Cooley remains an important part of my life. The house I was raised in is quite old. The part of the house referred to as the “new house” was built around 1910 by my grandfather. My father was born and raised and lived in the house for all but the last of his 98 years. His grandfather and great-grandfather would also have lived in the house and perhaps several other generations before that. The nearby Newtown Cemetery in Mountbagnal has a family plot and a headstone. 99
