Turn off and see us sometime, says winning Ardagh

THE PEOPLE of Ardagh, Co Longford (population 80), are hoping more people will turn off the N4 and come to visit them following their victory yesterday in the 1996 Tidy Towns Award.

The Minister for the Environment, Mr Howlin, said he'd see about getting the local authority to erect another road sign urging motorists to make the detour.

And Mr Seamus Kenny, accepting the award on behalf of his village, said he hoped the win would play its part in ending Co Longford's reign as "the Cinderella of the counties" when it came to tourism.

Ardagh is located one mile off the N4, to the left as you are travelling from Edgeworthstown to Longford. It is an old estate village, with solid stone buildings and stone walls, tidy, and littered with nothing more than flowerbeds. It is, according to the manager of the Ardagh heritage centre, Mr Pat Farrell, "beautiful, like something you'd imagine in a fairytale".

One would imagine its name would be on everyone's lips these days, given the number of times (seven) its name is scratched into the "most tidy village" trophy given out by the Tidy Town Awards. And it won the overall award before, in 1989.

Following that win, Mr Farrell said, the village was "packed" for weeks as committee members from other communities active in the Tidy Towns competition came to check out the winning formula.

Mr Kenny, a farmer, said the village's success was due to the work of 20 "staunch volunteers" backed up by everyone else in the village and surrounding countryside. The village had no problem with litter, and had carried out a lot of work on preservation, the care of hedges, and the planting of flowers.

Some £15,000 is raised locally every year towards the improvement of the village.

Cllr Peter Kelly, chairman of Longford County Council, was among the nine man (and no women) group that travelled to the award ceremony in Dublin. Longford. be said, was indeed the "Cinderella of the counties" in tourism.

"We were a bit behind in getting into the race," be said.