Per "Irish Counties," by J. J. Lee: The town of Portarlington, which lies on a bend in the River Barrow not far from the border with neighboring Co. Offaly (King's Co.), is now a quiet backwater of Co. Laois. Co. Laois is also known as Queen's Co. and Leix . In the last paragraph below, is mentioned the survival of Portarlington's church records. After the revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, which had ensured religious tolerance, French Protestant refugees flocked to what was then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in search of places in which they could live in peace. One of the many places they settled was Portarlington, and nowhere did their culture, religion and language survive more tenaciously. Portarlington was surrounded by bogs and forest and therefore sufficiently isolated from the rest of the countryside to maintain a separate identity. Second, the settlement was large enough to be self-sufficient and third, the place had a distinctive character in that an astonishingly high proportion of its families were of noble origin. The establishment of the French communities took place at a time when, in another Irish paradox, Roman Catholic Irish soldiers were fleeing to France after the Jacobite defeat at the hands of King William III, and it was one of William's senior lieutenant's, the Huguenot Henri Massue, Marquis de Ruvigny, later styled Earl of Galway, who got the Portarlington project under way. Portarlington had been laid out for English settlers with a market square and four streets leading from it. But the little town had suffered severe damage during the war, and de Ruvigny personally financed the construction of over 100 houses of unique design. The entrances and gardens were to the rear and blank walls faced the streets. The first wave of French immigrants arrived in 1692, many of whom were pensioned-off soldiers and their families. Most came from the officer class, which, at that time, was made up of sons of noble families. There were six ensigns, one cornet, 16 lieutenants, 12 captains and one lieutenant-colonel. The most elegent and magnificient of all, with his scarlet cloak and silver-buckled breeches was Robert d'Ully, Vicomte de Laval, a man of the royal blood line of King Henri de Navarre. However, the nobles of that era could hardly have been expected to fend for themselves, and a second group of "laboureurs," 13 families in all, arrived from the Swiss cantons where they had taken refuge, and gave the colony a more balanced character. So by the start of the 18th century the foundations of a lasting settlement were laid. There were stories from visitors from neighbouring areas of noblemen sipping a strange drink called :tea" from china cups under trees in the village square; of the wine of Bordeaux being favored over the whiskey of the surrounding countryside. Henri Massue became the undisputed leader of the Huguenot community in Britain and Ireland and was directly involved in the settlement of Portarlington in 1692. A number of forces combined to change the situation, too lengthy to go into here. Please read about high-church bishop William Moreton, from England, and the minister of the Eglise Francaise de St. Paul (Church of St. Paul), Reverend Benjamin de Daillon, and army chaplain Antoine Ligenier de Bonneval in your library reference books or on the Web. Suffice it to say, there was a major split in the religous community which lasted 26 years, and the turning point came when 37 families left for Dublin to worship at the French Calvinist churches in the capital, where their distinct language and customs were overwhelmed in a city which was quickly growing to become of the populous in Europe. Meanwhile, Portarlington was becoming increasingly Anglican, and therefore, more an Anglo-Irish town. Today, there are still Irish and Catholic families in the county who bear names such as Blanc and Champ, and families in other parts of the province of Leinster, both Catholic and Protestant, whose Huguenot forebears gave them names such as Dubois, Perrin, Du Moulin and De Mange. All that remains of the Portarlington French connection now are its meticulous records, a few of the old noble houses and an annual French Festival at which the wine of Bordeaux is imbibed in great quantities and snails and frog legs are eaten in abundance. Huguenots made a remarkable contribution to Irish history. The less noble branches of the immigration, notably the weavers who established the Irish poplin industry, now vanished like the immigrants themselves, contributed greatly to the economy of a country which had been ravaged by more than half a century of warfare prior to their arrival. Their memory survives in a county of moorland and bog, pasture and parkland, in the heart of Ireland's Central Plain; a county of level land, except in the northwest where the Slieve Bloom mountains once housed rebel Gaelic chieftains. Portarlington is now a backwater marked by cooling towers of a peat-powered electricity plant. The county town, Portlaois (formerly Maryborough) houses a giant prison, but the best place in which to lock yourself away with the memories of the French and their descendants is the town of Abbeyleix, planned in the 17th century by the local landlord, Viscount de Vesci, a nobleman of Norman descent. Here you will find Morrissey's pub, one of the most convivial and best-preserved bars in Ireland, a place to raise a glass of Bordeaux to the French who have passed on. Morrissey's bar and grocery was founded by E. J. Morrissey in 1775. Almost all the old furnishings remain. In 1876 an additional story was added to the house and according to the manager in 1997, John Lanigan, this was the last time the place was touched. Abbeyleix was the town in which workers made the carpeting for the "Titanic." There is evidently a new Huguenot memorial inscribed with names in Dublin, as well as a Huguenot museum. The records of Portarlington's Eglise Francaise de St. Paul were kept in French from their first entry in 1694, until finally being superseded by English in 1816. Fortunately, thse records were retained locally rather than sent to the Public Record Office in the Four Courts in Dublin, many of whose priceless papers were destroyed in a fire during the civil war in the 1920s. As a result, more is known about the French who peopled Portarlington than is known of the Irish and Anglo-Irish who inhabited the rest of the county. Jean