A market town on the River Suir, long associated with the Butler family, later Earls of Ormond. A priory was established at the end of the 12th or beginning of the 13th century for the canons regular of St Augustine. Later the lands formed part...
The Easter Rising of 1916 was a curious event, tiny in comparison with the rebellion of 1798, for instance, with only about 2000 people actively taking part in it. It was disastrously badly organised and commanded very little public support, but its martyred hero’s glow...
Loughside, mid-way up the western shore is Sketrick Castle. This large, four storey tower house guarded the causeway to Sketrick Island and was actively involved in warfare in the 16th century. The immediacy and need for the defence is vitally evident in this watery landscape....
Kerry has a clean beauty of bone about it denied to the other more fleshy counties of Ireland, for although this southwest corner was notably glaciated in the Ice Age it was not overcoated by Drift to the same extent. Clear hard outlines and boldly-drawn...
County Wicklow, with its moorland wastes and bare granite hills has a wealth of lovely valley, wooded glen, and smoking waterfall. Dean Swift likened it to “a frieze mantle fringed with gold lace”. Much of the coastland is low, being a drift covered plain, fringed...
"Sing the peasantry and then Hard-riding country gentlemen" County Meath – known as “royal Meath” from its ancient connection and the Kings of Tara – is a country of democratically level pastures, royally rich grasslands, slow rivers and humid airs. Its wide fields are necessarily intersected by...
Errigal (2466ft) is the tallest peak in the ice-carved Donegal Highlands. With its furrowed sides and the white screes of broken quartz it is far and away the finest of all conical mountains in Ireland. It is best approached by way of Dunlewy and one...
The traditional prophecy, attributed to St. Columbia, that “a stranger mounted on a white horse and bearing a shield of painted birds shall conquer Ulster” appeared to be fulfilled when John de Courcy headed the Norman invasion of Ulster in 1177. Gradually the Anglo-Norman overlords...
Dunluce (Dun Lios, the Fort of Enclosures) an Anglo-Norman castle build by Richard de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, about 1300, was taken by the Chief of the MacDonnell clan Somhairle Buidhe (Yellow Charles) in 1560 who reconstructed it. In the wars with the Tudor England,...
Enniskillen (Inis Ceitleann, Ceithle’s Island) the capital of County Fermanagh illustrates very well the long, neat, narrow street of the Northern Irish agricultural town. It stands on the winding River Erne between Upper and Lower Lough Erne. At this strategic bridge head the Maguires, turbulent...