Virginia Is Already a Place People Choose

A community update from Virginia Pages

The conversation this week about the bypass turned, as it often does, to a worry: that taking the traffic away would leave Virginia a "forgotten wee village." It's an understandable fear, and it deserves an honest answer. But here's a thought worth sitting with because the answer is already all around us.

The towns that fade after a bypass are the ones that only ever had passing trade: the places people stopped at because they happened to be on the road, not because they meant to. The towns that thrive are the ones people travel to on purpose. And on that measure, Virginia is in far better shape than the gloom suggests.

We're already a destination

Think about who already chooses Virginia, bypass or no bypass.

Start with the biggest of all: the Virginia Agricultural Show. This August it runs for the 83rd year an event that has drawn thousands of people into the town every summer for over eight decades, from far beyond the county, for one day of All-Ireland competitions, cattle, sheep, horses, home produce and the famous Baileys Champion Dairy Cow. Nobody has ever come to the Virginia Show because they happened to be passing. They come on purpose, and they always have.

Then look at the rest. We have a garden centre with a following well beyond the town the kind of place people set aside a morning to visit, and follow online in their thousands. We have a bridal boutique that draws brides from well beyond the county the kind of shop people plan a trip around, not one they wander into by chance. We have menswear worth the journey. We have food that people seek out rather than settle for. None of these depend on a traffic jam outside the door. People come for them.

And on the shores of Lough Ramor, we have something genuinely rare: a spread of wedding venues covering the whole market. A high-end country estate attracting couples from around the world. An intimate country house for smaller, quieter weddings. A hotel serving the larger, more general celebrations. Between them they bring visitors and their guests, and their spending into Virginia from across Ireland and beyond, for the happiest days of people's lives.

That's not a forgotten village. That's a destination that happens to be stuck behind a traffic problem.

Why a bypass helps a town like ours

Here's the point the worriers miss: not one of those businesses relies on the through-traffic. A bride doesn't buy her dress because she was idling at the roundabout. A couple doesn't book a lakeside wedding because they were driving through to Cavan. They come deliberately. So taking the through-traffic away doesn't take them away it takes away the thing that currently makes the trip harder: the congestion, the nowhere-to-park, the dash across a busy road.

As one person put it on our page this week, freer traffic means people will actually want to come to Virginia to shop, tourists will be able to park and see the place, pedestrians will be safer, and businesses will get their deliveries with less hassle. That's not wishful thinking it's exactly what happened in Kells once the M3 took the pressure off.

The bit that's genuinely exciting

There's an idea worth planting for the future. Destinations grow strongest in clusters. One brilliant bridal boutique brings brides to the town; two or three would make Virginia somewhere people set aside a whole day to visit. The same is true right across the board the more good, distinctive, worth-the-trip businesses a town gathers, the more each one benefits, because people come to make a day of it rather than a single stop.

Virginia already has the bones of that: the wedding trade, destination retail, food worth travelling for, and a lake most towns would give anything for. A calmer town centre, once the bypass takes the traffic, is exactly the kind of place more of those businesses would want to set up. The bypass isn't the end of Virginia as a place of business it could be the start of a better one.

And if anyone doubts the town can draw a crowd, remember this: the Virginia Show has been pulling people into this town, on purpose, for 83 years. It didn't need the through-traffic to become a destination, and it won't need it to stay one. That's the town's real character and a bypass simply gives it room to breathe.

Over to you

So today, instead of picturing what we might lose, it's worth picturing what we could build.

Which Virginia businesses do you travel to on purpose, the ones worth the trip? And what kind of business would you love to see open here that we don't have yet?

Let us know below. The more we know what draws people to Virginia, the better we can tell that story and the stronger the case for the town we could become.

This is a community piece from Virginia Pages, the local platform for Virginia, Co. Cavan. Virginia Pages Business Directory is where the town's businesses get found — if you run one, that's where people looking for you will look.