The Tipperary Antiquarian

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...