The Tipperary Antiquarian

One of the biggest discoveries I've made in the last year or so was the rediscovery of St. Patricks fingers on a stone near a holy well in North Tipp. These carving may in fact relate to sword sharpening and this has been linked to inauguration ceremonies for local kings / chiefs. For more information on sword sharpening stones see here https://aran.library.nuigalway.ie/handle/10379/2041 I originally came across a reference to them via a facebook friend online in the Irish Folklore Commissions manuscripts. Last August I did a talk on Rock Art in Tipperary in Portroe in which I mentioned St Patrick's fingers and a local man came up to me afterwards saying that he knew where they were located. It was not till January of this year that we got a chance to look for them and he and another man kindly showed me where they were. (Thanks to these two men for their kind help) It has since been added to the SMR under the following description. "Situated on W side of road 25m SW o...

I stumbled across a very interesting book on how Bunratty Castle and Folk Park became the tourist destination it is today by author Bernard Share titled "Bunratty: Rebirth of a Castle". From my reading it seems that to help mitigate the eventual removal of the enforced stop-over at Shannon Airport in the 1950s (which had been agreed in a bilateral agreement between Ireland and America in 1945). It was decided by Sean Lemass (who was then Minister of Industry and Commerce) that they should try to promote tourism further in the west around Shannon Airport and this happily coincided with the purchase of the castle by Lord Gort in 1953 and also the OPWs desire to protect the castle (which had been ongoing since the early 1900s). From there Lord Gort, who purchased the castle privately, was allowed to restore the castle with significant help from the OPW and eventually open it to the public. Later the idea of the banquet was added and finally the Folk Park was added on lands...

Did stone from walls of the Cashel of the Kings of Ulster (known as Grianan Aileach in Co. Donegal); end up as part of the Bishop's Palace in Limerick? "1101 It is probable that Murtagh O'Brien, King of Munster removed his residence to the city of Limerick after Kincora was destroyed. The first opportunity that offered he marched with a large army into Ulster, and demolished the Grennan of Ely in revenge for Kincora, and his soldiers brought the stone to Limerick where they were inserted on the parapet of the palace." Pg 80 The Diocese of Limerick Ancient and Mediaeval - Begley

We probably all remember the story of Robert Bruce and the spider in Rathlin Island. For me it was one of the stories told, maybe in our primary school history books. He had suffered defeat in Scotland in 1306 and was licking his wounds supposedly in a cave on Rathlin Island off the Irish coast where he saw a spider building his spider web over and over again, never giving up. This is in legend is thought to have inspired him to try and free Scotland from the English again even after a number of set-backs. This he succeeded following the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 and he was proclaimed King of Scotland. Robert's brother Edward then proceeded to Ireland to help open up a 2nd front against the English. The Bruces had some claim to the Kingship of Ulster through their mothers side. He landed in Ulster with a large army and with the help of the O'Neills, Edward was proclaimed High King of Ireland. The Scots and their Irish allies went to have some major victories over th...

"In the long ago it was a Custom with the people of this district to kill the first goose of the season on St Michael's Eve, 28th September. It was eaten on St. Michael's Day, 29th September and for that reason was always called the "Michaelmas Goose". http://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4922260/4865099/5022402

Lackamore is a townland in Castletown Arra of 181 acres. Its name is thought to come from An Leaca Mhór which translates as the "Big or great hillside". Arra's only confirmed wedge tomb is located prominently within the townland with views to the Clare Hills in the East on which there are other wedge tombs located and down to Youghal Bay which to me also stands out. De Valera & O'Nuallain in "The Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland" suggest that this tomb and Cooleen near the Silvermines were evidence of a link between the wedge tombs of East Clare and the Kilcommon Group around Rearcross & Kilcommon area. They proposed that there may be there a mining link between the settlements that may have accompanied them. I've always found this interesting considering the slate quarry industy that has been carried out in the locality up to the present day. The half-barony of Arra must be unique in the variety of megalithic monuments st...

An abandoned castle on the Clare bank of the River Shannon near the "Leap of Doonass" close to Castleconnell. The castle today is very impressive, perched on a rock above the River and with rock cut paths leading up to it from the water side. The Leap of Doonass was where the power of the River Shannon met its narrowest point and as a result were powerful rapids. Here most boats had to disembark and either carry on by foot to another waiting boat or lift the boat out and carry it with them. As such this was a very strategic point on the River. The river itself was a routeway into the midlands of Ireland and this point here controlled access to it via the boat. It is likely that the current building is an 18th century folly known as "The Turret". At this site however there was likely to have been a much older castle. There is evidence of some medieval stone work which was probably reused in this brick and mortar folly. It is thought that there may have been ...

It was an inauguration site of the Dalcassians and it is likely to be where Brian Boru himself assumed his leadership in 976 upon his brothers death. It is located near Tulla in Co. Clare. Voices from teh Dawn has some brilliant information on it here.  https://voicesfromthedawn.com/magh-adhair/ It must be 15 years or so since I last visited and I'm well overdue a revisit. There is a bullaun stone located near the mound and a standing stone on the other side of a river that runs near it.  I had this picture on an external hard-drive that broke down on me. Thankfully I was able to have all the photos recovered, so The Tipperary Antiquarian's archive remains intact. (Including all the early out of focus ones from the early 2000s like this one!)

The Moon appearing from out of a cloud on the horizon. After a few days of cloudy sunsets around the Winter Solstice I wasn’t holding much hope of getting a picture of the Minor Winter Lunar Standstill Moonrise. Here is a link to what exactly a Lunar Standstill is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_standstill   Clive Ruggles would be widely acknowledged as being one of the leading archaeoastronomers in the British Isles and he conducted a statistical analysis of the Stone Rows of Cork & Kerry in 1996 (see link for the paper  http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1996JHAS...27...55R&defaultprint=YES&filetype=.pdf ) and from this he conclusively shows that they are aligned to the various standstills of the Moon at it’s Major & Minor points in the cycle. This cycle takes 18.6 years to complete, so the next time the moon will be back at this extreme in the cycle will be in 2033. Why the ancients were so concerned with the Moons cyc...

Rinn Bó Phadruig looking east I was recently reading through some of Dermot F. Gleeson's writings in the North Munster Antiquarian Journal and came across a very interesting one from 1958 titled "St. Patrick in Ormond". As I read through it I noted that I had read most of the references to St. Patrick in Gleesons paper in the North Tipp area before and it was with great surprise that I found Gleeson's reference to the "Rinne Bó Phadruig" or track of St. Patrick's Cow in the Ormond area. I had read about St. Patrick's cow's mythical journeys in different parts of the country such as in Limerick near Knockpatrick and in South Tipp / Waterford area from Lismore to Cashel before. Dr. Louise Nugent has written a great paper on it here. Gleeson details this road as follows in the NMAJ "The only other tradition of the saint I know of in the Ormond area concerns not himself but his cow. This is the "Rinne Bó Phadruig" or track...

Cashel within Mooghaun hill-fort, Co. Clare. I visited a lovely Cashel (stone ring-fort) at Mooghaun hill-fort near Newmarket on Fergus in Co. Clare recently and it got me thinking of a farmer that told me there was only one Cashel "East of the Shannon". Now this isn't true but they are fairly rare in comparison with ring-fort to the east of the shannon. For example in North Tipp there are only 28 Cashels in comparison with 794 ring-forts. This is likely that in North Tipp that building materials for a ring-fort were more readily available such as timber for a palisade that was often built on top of them. Interestingly of the 28, one of the most impressive was probably in the townland of Knigh near Puckane and when built would have looked like the Cashel at Mooghaun pictured above (it is likely it has been reconstructed at Mooghaun). Daniel Grace wrote about the Cashel at Knigh in his book "Portrait of a Parish: Monsea and Killodiernan". He says it is kn...

This area seems to have been sacred in pre-christian times From A Village by the Shannon  "Close to a well in the area of Cragg, now in the parish of Newport, lived a Celtic Druid named Ernach and his wife Cominta. They had a son and daughter whose names were Senan and Comminate. In that age people had just one name.... This druid family embraced the new religion and were converted to Christainity.Imbued with the zeal and fervour of missionaries they began to spread the new message of fatih. The daughter Comminate preached the gospel with her brother Senan and baptised people in the stream beside the well and also erected a stone altar where sacrifice was offered."  This "altar" is the bullaun stone described further down. It goes on to say that Senan went to Castleconnell to a pagan community located there and converted them. On the Clare side of the River Shannon is his holy well which is reputed to hold cures.   The 18th of March is the pattern day o...

I've been meaning to write about the burial mound at Ashleypark for a while but never got around to it. One of the main reasons probably is due to the lack of folklore associated with this mound. It was located within 40 acres of forestry which had been there for at least 200 years and didn't even feature on any of the OS maps. The area was known as "the oakwood". In 1979 the land was bought by a new owner from the Ashleypark estate and it was the new owner's intention to level the trees and use the land for tillage. It was during these works in 1980 that the chamber was discovered and an excavation begun. The excavation report notes that "there was local tradition that a king or chieftain was buried in the mound" (Manning et al, 1985, 63). In 2005 I was looking for another cairn at Whitstone a couple of miles from here and got talking to a local farmer. He told me a bit about the Ashley Park cairn as well. He told me "that the mound at Ash...

The overgrown hall-house. This building just outside Ballina is recorded in the SMR as a Castle - Hall House. It is described as follows: "Situated on high ground overlooking a deep ravine and nearby church (TN025-016----) to the S. The poorly preserved remains of a small rectangular building surviving to first-floor level only, built with roughly coursed sandstone rubble of cyclopean appearance. The building consists of a narrow small ground-floor chamber (int. dims. 6.65m N-S; 3.05m E-W; Wall T 2m) accessed from a segmental-arched doorway situated in the centre of the E wall. This appears to be an insertion and may belong a later phase of construction. The ground floor had a wooden ceiling carried in the thickness of the wall with a destroyed flat-headed window in the centre of the W wall which replaced an earlier window. At first-floor level there is a single-light round-arched window in the N wall (Fitzpatrick 1985, vol. 3, 75-86) which is now obscured by ivy g...