Kildavin is a pleasant enough little village some eight miles north of the site of Duffry Hall but it seems to have had an irresistible attraction for the Colcloughs not only from the Duffry but from Wexford town, Ballyteige, Boley, Kilkenny and even Dublin. Its five large 18th Century houses, Kildavin House, Upper Kildavin, Lower Kildavin, Crowsgrove and Elmgrove, just outside Tullow, were at one time all occupied by Colcloughs. Even some of 'Sir' Vesey's descendants may have moved there. In 1648 Dudley Colclough of Monart was living quietly at Garryhasten and was married to Katherine Esmonde, the daughter of Sir John Esmonde of Ballinastraw. At about the same time there was a Captain Thomas Colclough in charge of a garrison of 62 men in Wexford. His identity is something of a mystery unless he is he Thomas, brother of John of Burslem and son of William of Grays Inn, who seems to have been in close contact with his Irish cousins. In 1656 we find that this Thomas, as part of the Cromwellian settlement, had been granted some of Dudley's lands at Monart. and 1,262 acres in the parish of Carnew. However there are no further records of him after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. For the next 70 years there were no Colcloughs in the area till Henry arrived

Henry was the youngest son of Dudley of Duffry. He settled there in 1729 on his marriage to Margaret, daughter of John Beauchamp of Ballylogher who claimed royal descent through the houses of both York and Lancaster, and had four sons and a daughter. Henry's eldest son, Dudley, took over Bohermore House, Co. Carlow, which his father had acquired, and on his death in 1759 this passed to his brother Beauchamp who had married Bridget, daughter of John McCarthney of Dublin. Beauchamp's descendants spread themselves over Canada, the United States and the U.K. but there are few parts of the world in which they have not left a record of at least temporary residence. Beauchamp's two sons Henry and Beauchamp II married the Crawford sisters of Millwood, Co. Fermanagh, whose uncle was Guy Carelton, 1st Lord Dorchester and Governor of Canada. One branch of the Henry's family went to Charleston, S.C where there are still descendants to be found. They have changed the spelling of the name to Colcolough. All of Beauchamp II's children went to Canada in the early 1800s to benefit, one presumes, from nepotism. A daughter of Beauchamp's, Bridget, married the chieftain of the Urquhart Clan of Aberdeenshire, and so another remarkable name begins to appear in family christenings.

On the death of his father Thomas Francis took over the practice in Wexford. He had married in 1769 Catherine daughter of Henry McMahon and had two sons, John Henry and Dudley Thomas. The two boys went as boarders to the newly-established Catholic school in Kilkenny where John Henry seems to have done remarkably well. As an Irish national hero every detail of his school career, class-marks, prizes (of which there seem to have been very many) and reports have been carefully preserved, but not much seems to have survived about his brother Dudley Thomas except that he became a burgess of Enniscorthy and died unmarried. Leaving the law to his brother, John Henry qualified as a physician and surgeon and practiced in the Ballyteige and Kilmore neighbourhood, his patients being for the most part peasants and fishermen by whom he was trusted, respected and greatly loved and for whose political aspirations he developed a warm sympathy.

Sir Jonah Barrington in his 'Personal Sketches' describes a dinner at Lady Colclough's house in Georges St., Wexford, in April of 1798 at which he was one of seventeen guests of whom he said "the loyalists amongst us did not exceed four or five" and the following evening with the Harveys at Bargy Castle where it would seem that he was the only loyalist in the company, which included John Henry Colclough, Richard and Henry Sheares, and William Hatton. The dinner-table conversation at both parties was such that he immediately wrote to the Secretary of State warning him that the insurrection would break out much sooner than the government expected, and that troops should be sent instantly to garrison the town of Wexford. He asserts that he did not name his fellow-guests, but Madden in his "United Irishmen" expresses doubts on this, for on the outbreak of the insurrection practically all of them, including John Henry Colclough were arrested and were hanged within three months. Barrington does admit that with his friend the lawyer Beauman, he drew up a list of those he considered likely to be hanged of the 17 guests at the first dinner. Lady Colclough's son John got away to England but was imprisoned in the following year.

When Colclough and Fitzgerald arrived at the rebel camp they found it in confusion and disarray but their arrival brought an immediate revival of morale. Fitzgerald they kept with them to take charge of operations and Colclough was sent back to announce their intention of an immediate attack on Wexford. Riding into the Bull Ring at Wexford he was at once surrounded by a large crowd to whom he gave the rebels' message in a loud voice. The result was immediate panic. He went into the prison to visit Harvey and then rode to Ballyteige Castle where he stayed quietly at home until one evening while he was sitting down to supper with his wife and daughter a messenger arrived to warn him that a body of troops was approaching to arrest him. He jumped out of the dining-room window, borrowed the messenger's horse to save the time of saddling up one of his own, galloped down to Kilmore Quay where he concealed the saddle in a shed and turned the horse loose to graze in a field then taking a boat rowed out to the Great Saltee Island. This he intended as the first stage in a journey to France where his wife and daughter would be able to follow him when things had quietened down. There was, he knew, a French squadron approaching the Wexford coast, and there was a possibility that he might be able to attract their attention and get a passage. Failing this, there were the smugglers. They carried on their business, war or no war, and a rendezvous with them on the Island was about due.

The peasant who farmed the Island as his tenant helped to disguise him as a labourer in his own ragged cast-off clothes and accommodated him in his cottage. On the following day Bagenal Harvey arrived on the island but there was no disguising him. Barrington described him as 5ft 4ins tall, pock-marked face, scraggy throat, figure thin and ill put together, limbs short, slight and 'wobbling'. With his arrival it was decided that the cave which was ordinarily the warehouse for smuggled goods and the entrance to which was quite undetectable except to the initiated provided the safest refuge and there the two took up their residence.

A highly unpopular and unsuccessful physician of the name of Waddy who coveted Colclough's practice approached the military commander with the suggestion that he might be on the Saltees. This was disregarded but Waddy was so insistent that to get rid of him a detachment of troops was sent with him to the Island. He knew of the existence of the cave to which he led them after a preliminary reconnaissance and Colclough and Harvey were arrested. A contemporary print purports to show Harvey and a smartly-dressed Colclough with his wife and a smudge in the background possibly his daughter emerging from a cave the conspicuous entrance to which could certainly never have been concealed from the excise men - no Dr Waddy in the picture. To exculpate Waddy it was subsequently stated that the troops having failed to find the cave were rowing back to Kilmore when the fugitives lit a fire in the cave to cook their dinner and the smoke emerging from a fissure in the cliff was observed and they returned and found the cave, an alternative version being that the domestic staff from Ballyteige who had accompanied Colclough to the Island decided that it was washing day and after the soldiery had left proceeded to hang out sheets, table-cloths and all the rest of the linen at the cave mouth to dry and it was this seen from the boat which caused the return. Colclough's patients together with a number of other Wexford residents certainly did subsequently seek out Dr. Waddy but not in pursuit of medical attention and after spending some months in running from one hiding-place to another he met with a singularly unpleasant end.

The nautical career of John, born at Ballyteige on 3 Sept. 1733, younger brother of Thomas Francis and uncle of John Henry, seems to have been uneventful; there is certainly nothing about it to justify the confusion with that of the Quaker Coakley who died in Trinidad with three sea-chests full of pieces of eight under his bed. It is, though, difficult to distinguish him from the succession of John Colcloughs of Liverpool who throughout the eighteenth century appear in port entry books and other shipping records as masters of Liverpool ships trading to America and who were all descended either from members of the Staffordshire branch of the family who had moved to Cheshire or the earlier Cheshire settlers. Amongst these was a John 'Colcok', master of the sloop 'Sarah', trading to Mobile, Alabama, in the 1730s; he was much concerned with the well-being of the Chickesaw Indians. The first reference to him in the Colonial State Papers is a report to the Secretary of State, John Oglethorpe, from Samuel Eveleigh, dated 1st January 1737 that "The sloop Sarah, John Colcok master, is bound again to Mobile; when she returns if anything of moment offers from that place I will write you. I cannot remember whether I have already advised you what Colcok informed me, that Mons. Bienville had wrote to France for 5 or 6,000 regular troops." On May 25 of the following year the Council of Trade and Plantations received a report from its president, William Bull, that "Colcok's information that the French have erected fortresses down the Mississippi to Mobile and have destroyed Indians who interrupted them and have ordered a force from France and 1,000 white men from Canada to destroy the Chickesaw Indians." Two days later John Colcok, mariner, swore an information before the Lt. Governor, Thomas Broughton, that "I arrived in Mobile on 14 April last and found most of that colony and New Orleans amounting with the Illinois to near 3,000 men had gone to war with the Chickesaws". We hear no more of the master of the "Sara" but throughout the 18th century there were a number of John Colclough shipmasters trading from Liverpool, conveying cargoes of Irish "indentured labourers" to America and more than one of these was suspected of conniving at or facilitating the escape of part of his cargo from its consignees.

To return to John of Ballyteige, after a few years at sea he settled down as a merchant in the island of Montserrat. Monserrat had been populted extensively by the Irish throughout the 18^th century. In 1724 it was noted that the parish of St Patrick had no protestant church, being exclusively populated by Irish Catholics, while in St Anthony's parish there were 68 Protestant families and 94 Irish Catholic families. He married and had a family of two sons and two daughters but unfortunately Montserrat records except for some jury lists in which John appears, have all been destroyed by fires, earth-quakes, pirates and French invaders. Montserrat was essentially an Irish colony from which with fair winds Cork could be reached in six weeks - to this day its coloured population speak with a rich Irish brogue - and most of its inhabitants returned to Ireland for births and marriages the records of which have suffered only the fate of other Irish records. The Devereux family of Ballysop had a plantation adjacent to the Colcloughs' home and when Edward Devereux married John's eldest daughter it was in Wexford that the wedding took place. With the French invasion of 1782 the two brothers, John and Dudley escaped to North Carolina, their father by then having died and their two sisters, Margaret and Mary, being in Ireland.

Dudley decided to stay in North Carolina and may have had descendants. John, attracted by accounts of the generous grants of land being given in Canada to loyalists from the south moved on with his wife and two-year old son to Quebec where he obtained a grant at Maskinonge on the St. Lawrence River. In 1808 he is listed in Ontario as a loyalist on the United Empire List. 

At this point there is some confusion.  John may have had a son called Dudley.  Alternatively this next Dudley is more probably a son of "Sir" Vesey by Mary Connors, the daughter of the gate keeper at Duffry Hall.  She had 3 children by Vesey - Dudley, Vesey and Margaret.  Margaret,emigrated to New Brunswick, The younger brother Vesey,was a Warrant Officer in the Royal Navy and settled in County Cork on his retirement.   We do know, whatever his parentage, that in 1809 while staying with  the Beauchamp Colcloughs, at Kildavin Dudley met and married their friend Elizabeth, grand-daughter of the colourful John Eaton of Powers Court, Goresbridge, who in one night's card-playing had lost all his worldly possessions to one of the Loftus family. Elizabeth's father was Beauchamp's legal advisor, James Eaton. Her grandfather, having lost his estate, remained in possession accompanied on all occasions by two thugs armed with pike and blunderbuss, to ward of any of Loftus's summonses servers. He finally reached a compromise and allowed Loftus to take possession of the estate, retaining a tenancy for life of his own house, which Loftus surrounded with a high wall when he built Mount Loftus. John Eaton's grandfather had been Theophilus Eaton, a son of the first Governor of Maryland. In 1812 Dudley decided to return to Canada with his wife and two children, Frances born at Kildavin in 1810 and John Dudley Eaton at Wexford in the following year.  Dudley was married in the Church of Ireland and his children brought up as Protestants. On May 20 1820 Brig Cornet, under the command of Capt Anderson arrived in Quebec from Dublin with Mrs Colclough and family.  Dudley had presumably preceded her.  He and his family stayed at Adams Mill with the Adams family who were related to the Staffordshire Colcloughs and for the next half-century Adams Mill was a kind of staging camp and second home for all the Wexford and Kildavin Colcloughs who emigrated to Canada. 

John Richard had a daughter, who died in her early twenties after an academic career of great promise, and four sons. The eldest, John George, having graduated with distinction in classics at Lavalle University went to Dublin to read for the Bar. The second, Edgar, became a Jesuit and was director of education of the Province of Quebec and author of a number of books upon educational problems. The two younger sons having seen the building of the Inter-Colonial Railway and its effect in opening up the whole of the east bank of the St. Lawrence were completely obsessed by railways and could envisage no human existence away from them. Richard in due course became manager of the Saguenay River Sector of the Canadian National Railways leading a conventional life in Montreal with his wife Elizabeth and his one invalid son, but John's existence as "depecheur des trains" to the Inter-Colonial Railway was very different. He lived during the summer in a magnificent Pullman coach travelling between Quebec and Halifax and parking on sidings as the spirit moved him, tapping into the railway's telegraph lines to perform his administrative functions. In the winter he operated from a suite in the railway-owned hotel at Riviere du Loup. When in 1907 John George took his wife and children to Canada to meet his parents they were met by John with his private coach at Halifax. It happened that the Allen Line ship which was carrying the Colcloughs was also carrying the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Wilfred Laurier, returning from the Imperial Conference in London. Whilst the Colclough coach was hitched on to the boat-train which left immediately, Sir Wilfred was subjected to a civic reception and celebrations in Halifax and did not get away until the next day. Meanwhile an unauthorised message had been telegraphed down the line that the boat train had left with the Prime Minister's coach in tow. The result was that for the five hundred miles from Halifax to Bic the Colcloughs were greeted by crowds cheering and waving flags and bands playing on the platforms as the train passed through stations whilst the progress of the Prime Minister next day was completely ignored.