WHILE there may be no national Tidy Towns competition this year, that doesn’t mean that local groups around the county are sitting on their laurels. Quite the contrary. Since lockdown ended, most groups have never been busier and many have seen a bump in membership, because people have been spending more time closer to home. In Kilkishen, the Tidy Towns group is close to ticking another project off its ‘To Do’ list. That is the renovation of the old forge building, which dates back some centuries. “The forge building goes back to the 1700s, but we don’t officially know the date it was built,” Elizabeth Brady of Kilkishen Tidy Towns outlined. “It was built without plaster. It’s across the road from the old blacksmith’s house, which is in private ownership. That’s very quaint and Éamon de Valera visited it in the 1960s. It was a spontaneous thing. He saw it and asked his driver to stop. The locals who had …
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