17 Jan Wexford and the invasion route…..check you roots..lots of names
The conventional image of Ireland – of luminescent lakes, blue mountains, rock-strewn fields, bogs dark as sachertorte, and peasent cottages coated in generations of whitewash – simply does not hold here. This south-eastern cornerof the country is quite distinctive, due partly to topography and partly to the confluence of different ethnic groups and cultures. Most of Co. Wexford was inhabited in Christ’s time by the Brigantes, a British Celtic tribe who also held northern England. North of these were the Corionii and north again, stretching up into what is now north Wicklow and south Dublin, the Menapii, a tribe of Belgae from theMeuse and lower Rhine who fled to Ireland to escape Caesar’s legions. So already we have the beginnings of an ethnic hotchpotch. Add to these, then, the Gaelic Celts who arrived some time in the first century AD, the Norse who founded the town of Wexford (they called it Weisfjord) in the ninh century, the all-conquering Normans in the twelfth and the Cromwellians, who turned it into a garrison town in the seventeenth and we have, indeed, a fullblooded Irish stew, bubbling and boiling with a rich assortment of cultural influences. As late as the start of the twentieth century, three different languages were being spoken here – Irish, English and Yola, which is an old mixture of Flemish, old Norman-English and old Saxon. The region’s varied inheritance is further emphasized by the gamut of names of the people who live here: Kinsella, Murphy, Doran, Hayes, Keohoe, Nolan, O’Connor, Larkin, Doyle, Sweetman, Dake, Fleming, Sinnott, Roche, Prendergast, Pender, Walsh, Wallace, Devereux, French, Lambert, Power (la Poer), Neville, Rossiter, Furlong, Harvey, Etchingham, Millar, Browne, Moore, Jenkins, Hamilton, Hempenstall. There is also a recent and growing influx of German, Italian and oriental patronymics.
People, landscape, climate, all show a marked diversity from the rest of the country. This is the driest and warmest part of Ireland, temperatures reaching an average of 62 degrees Fahrenheit in high summer. Its eastern littoral, unlike any other part of the country consists of an unbroken stretch of thirthy miles of low-lying land fringed by largely deserted beaches of fine sand, normally ignored by those who prefer stark theatre in their landscape.
Tours of Ireland can include this wonderful region. With Ireland Luxury Tours we can research family roots and have been somewhat successful at finding family history.