Níl áit ar bith níos áille Ná an choill i nDún a’ Rí, Áit a shníonn an abhainn ársa Idir cnoic na ndroimníní. Má tá buairt nó sos ón saol uait, Téigh ann is siúil go réidh, Éist leis an t-uisce ag briseadh thar cloch Is na duilleoga ag séideadh leis an ngaoth. Is ann
In 1174 AD a fierce sea battle raged in Dungarvan bay that was to be recorded as Munster’s last Norse battle. The Hiberno-Norse were descendant of the Scandinavian Vikings that had settled on the south east coast a few hundred years earlier. They had likely established a settlement along the bay as several Viking/Norse place
I was born very near the Brown Flesk river in the early forties. In my youth I spent a lot of what spare time I had at the river. To me at the time it was a very big river as I knew no other river. As our small farm was bounded on one side
Very nearly twenty years ago the world was about to enter the twenty-first Century on midnight 31 December it occurred to me as to many others to consider, how would it be fitting to mark this momentous moment. I looked back in time to the Ireland of the previous millennium and thought of the Vikings’
The Edenderry canal breach, 1989 Something was happening but throughout Edenderry people continued on their daily grind. We tramped home from school in good humour as the newness of our Christmas toys sustained the mundaness of January. But near the Blundell Aqueduct, that remarkable engineering feat where the canal passes over the road, farmers grumbled.
An eel, a dipper, a tomato, a kingfisher or a heron, is there an odd one out on a stretch of the River Dodder? For a very brief time I saw an eel, a small, black, viper looking yet harmless eel wriggling across the shallow river bed out to the middle bed of the low
Sounds of water lapping, squelching, splashing, glugging, flowing are trapped within my hiking boots which trudged the Wicklow hills. Heading to the Sally Gap, I don my newly polished boots. Leaving the forest tracks behind, we head cross country towards Lugalla or Fancy Mountain. “Watch out for bright green moss” said my companion. Too late!
Growing up, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, was my favourite TV programme. Twain’s classic gripped me with the escapades of the duo on a raft on the Mississippi. Could we have such a raft in Clondalkin? One summer, 1984, my cousin John O’Byrne came to stay. It so happened that there were
When I was a little girl, I spent many hours wandering the stately rooms and echoing hallways of Castletown House, admiring the elegance of the country house, skipping through corridors and rooms big and small, noting every item of furniture and counting every secret doorway. My mother worked as a guide there when the house
It’s amazing how you can spend your whole life passing through a space, and still know so little of it. Caught up in the clamour of everyday life, you often overlook the backstreets and the laneways. The nooks and crannies off the beaten path from which we seldom stray. The lockdown changed that for lots
Ah NO – this is not about water-divining, but about the wealth of clues in Irish place-names to tell us about the significance of some waterway or water source in that area. It could be a clue to a search. Meaningful Irish words often found incorporated into place names include Cora – a weir –
From a young age, Finn mac Cumhaill knew that he was different to the other youths. And the other youths had always sensed a peculiar outlandishness in the young Finn. Because of this, they shunned him, mocked him, and excluded him from their activities. You see, Finn was different. He preferred nature to people. It’s
To use this interactive map, click on a county to view the list of stories connected with it.