20 things to know about Monaghan
The old council site published a booklet under this title, called Monaghan Municipal District: 20 Things to Know. The booklet is long gone and the flipbook it lived in stopped working years ago. This is a replacement, written from scratch and kept to the same idea: twenty things that are actually useful to know about the town and the district around it.
1. The name means little hills. Muineachán comes from muine, a thicket or a hillock. Monaghan County Council’s preferred reading is land of the little hills.
2. Those hills are drumlins. The whole county is a drumlin belt, left by retreating ice. It is why the roads wind, why the fields are small, why nothing here is flat and why the linen industry took hold rather than large scale tillage.
3. The town centre is four squares, not a main street. Church Square, the Diamond, Old Cross Square and Market Square link in a chain. This comes from the plantation layout after the 1613 charter.
4. The Market House dates from 1792. Designed by Colonel William Hayes, five bays of limestone in Market Square, and still the finest building in the town.
5. The courthouse is from 1830. Joseph Welland designed it, and it fronts Church Square.
6. The Rossmore Memorial pushed the old cross out of the Diamond. The 1876 drinking fountain took the space, and the seventeenth century cross was moved to what has been Old Cross Square ever since.
7. Rossmore Castle is gone. The Westenra family seat south west of the town was abandoned after the Second World War and demolished in the 1970s. The terraces are still in the trees in Rossmore Forest Park.
8. Rossmore Forest Park is the best thing within five minutes of the town. Coillte manage it with the county council. Marked walks from about one kilometre to eight, lakes, a yew avenue, a walled garden and a large playground.
9. The county museum is free and it is good. It moved into the Peace Campus in summer 2025 and shares the building with the town library. Its permanent exhibition is built around what living beside a border has meant here.
10. St Macartan’s Cathedral was built with local limestone. Begun in the 1860s on the high ground on the Clones road, from a quarry near Old Cross Square.
11. Monaghan grew on linen. The county sat in the Ulster linen belt, and the markets, mills and bleach greens paid for most of what you see in the centre.
12. There is no railway. The line reached Monaghan in the 1850s and closed in the 1950s. The nearest stations are Dundalk and Portadown, each around fifty to fifty five kilometres away.
13. The bus is the real connection. Bus Éireann route 32 runs roughly hourly, seven days a week, from Dublin Busáras and Dublin Airport to Monaghan and on to Letterkenny. About an hour and fifty minutes to Dublin.
14. The border is fifteen kilometres away. North on the N2 at Emyvale. There is no checkpoint, but currency, mobile roaming and fuel prices all change.
15. Partition changed the town more than anything else. Monaghan’s trade, transport and markets ran north into Ulster. The 1921 border cut all of it, and the town spent most of the century at the end of a road rather than in the middle of one.
16. Seven people were killed here on 17 May 1974. A car bomb on Church Square, part of the co-ordinated Dublin and Monaghan bombings. The memorial in front of the courthouse was unveiled by President Mary McAleese on the thirtieth anniversary.
17. It is the largest town in the county. The 2022 census recorded 7,894 people in Monaghan town.
18. Glaslough is worth the ten kilometres. A former national Tidy Towns winner, and the home of Castle Leslie Estate.
19. The Garage Theatre is better than the town’s size suggests. A 289 seat auditorium, a studio, a gallery and a bar, on the education campus on the Armagh Road, running a full year round programme.
20. Gaelic football is not a hobby here. Monaghan Harps has been the town club since 1905. St Tiernach’s Park in Clones, half an hour west, is the county ground and a traditional Ulster championship venue.
If you want any of this in more depth, the history page covers the town’s development, things to do covers the museum, the park and the squares, and getting here covers the roads and buses properly.
Details on this page last checked . If something here is out of date, it probably is our fault rather than yours.