The 9th century Rindoon Bronze Plaque, now housed in the Treasury of the National Museum of Ireland, was found in the graveyard of St John’s Hospital in Rindoon in the 19th century and sold to the Royal Irish Academy for £10.
The 500m long town wall in Rindoon, with its three towers and a gate house, was built in 1251 and took only one year to construct.
Only 30 trained archers defended 800-1000 Anglo-Norman settlers in the 13th Century at Rindoon.
The mile long canal leading from Lough Ree to Lecarrow Harbour was constructed in c.1850 to enable corn from the adjacent mill and stone from the nearby quarry to be moved by water. It was re-opened in the 1960’s and now is a busy harbour in the summer used by recreational boats.
Suffragettes Lily and Rosie Cadiz were brought up by the Gunning family in St John’s House, Lecarrow in the early 1900s. They were imprisoned in Holloway Jail in London and in Mountjoy and Kilmainham Jails in Dublin for throwing stones at shop windows and gluing door locks as part of their campaign. Imprisoned under the pseudo-nom ‘The Murphy Sisters’ they were forcibly fed. Despite this they joined the British Army as nurses in WWI during which both their fiancés were killed. They never married and, somewhat impoverished, died in Dublin in the 1960s.
The precise centre of Ireland, as published by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, is in the townland of Carnagh in the Parish of St.John’s.
In a specially made casket a gangrenous leg belonging to Willy Grady, a blacksmith connected to the Leonard family who lived in Rindoon Castle until 1948, was buried in the Leonard family plot in Old St John’s Cemetery in the 1970’s. He died a week later in Roscommon Hospital. However, his body is buried in Carrick on Shannon.
The oldest dated grave in Ireland, according to the National Monument Service, can be found in St John’s Hospital graveyard. The Glysk grave has a date of 1539.
One of the main designers of the Royal Air Force’s famous WW2 fighter, the Spitfire, was David Cameron, born in Lecarrow at Mount Plunkett. He is buried in the Church of Ireland graveyard in the adjacent parish of Kiltoom.
St John’s Wood, with over 300 acres of natural woodland, is one of the oldest woods in Europe being over 7000 years old.
The Rinn Duin Looped Walk was placed within the top 15 Looped Walks of Ireland by the Sunday Times in 2012.
The first wedding for nearly 700 years in Rindoon’s newly conserved Anglo-Norman Parish Church took place in June 2012 .
