In 433 AD St. Patrick lit a fire on Hill of Slane, in an act of defiance of the pagan High King Lóegaire (Laoire), according to the monk Muirchú’s highly mythological 7th century hagiography of St. Patrick, Vita sancti Patricii. Lóegaire had forbidden any other fires while a festival fire was burning at his headquarters on the Hill Tara, which can be clearly seen from the Hill of Slane, about 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) away, according to Muirchú’s account. Other accounts of the life of St. Patrick describe various versions of what happened after the saint lit his defiant fire. The accounts agree that Lóegaire apparently allowed St. Patrick, who he had reportedly been trying to assassinate, to continue spreading the word of Christianity in Ireland. In another legendary act, St. Patrick would later in his life baptize two of Laoghaire’s daughters, Eithne the Fair and Fedelm the Red at Rathcroghan’s Ogulla Holy Well in County Roscommon. Today the Hill of Slane is dominated by a group of picturesque ruins and historical sites, most dating to the middle ages. The ruins of a friary church, with a still in use graveyard, and college can be seen on the top of the hill. The now ruined friary church was built on the site of an earlier church, was restored in 1512. The ruins include a 19-meter (62 ft) high early gothic tower. The friary was abandoned in 1723. A holy well, now filled in with rocks due to safety concerns, is located just inside the graveyard’s wall. At this well, Patrick is said to have baptized St. Erc, a pagan priest, who he appointed a bishop. The foundation of the original monastery on the Hill of Slane is attributed to St. Erc and it remained active for at least six hundred years. The baptism and life of St. Erc are on firmer historical footing than many of St. Patrick’s mythical exploits such as driving the snakes out of Ireland. Next to the friary church is a structure known as the college. These ruins are from different phases of construction and various purposes, according to the Voice From Dawn website. From Voice of Dawn: “The earliest building, likely a tower house, is now known as the “rectory,” and was used for the administration of the parish. In the late 15th century a chantry college was built on the site, endowed for priests to celebrate masses for the souls of the Fleming family. The structure housed four priests, four lay-brothers and four choirboys in some comfort, with fireplaces and a double garderobe (toilet). The buildings were situated around an open rectangular cloister. The college was rebuilt in the 16th century with a further Fleming family bequest, There was once a bawn (defensive enclosure) around the tower house, whose only remnant today is its massive gatehouse.” https://voicesfromthedawn.com/hill-of-slane/ Over the centuries the site endured numerous attacks and tribulations including dissolution of the monastery by Henry VIII in 1631 and attacks by Oliver Cromwell’s troops in 1651. Sources and links: Discovery Boyne Valley https://www.discoverboynevalley.ie/boyne-valley-drive/heritage-sites/hill-slane Voices From Dawn https://voicesfromthedawn.com/hill-of-slane/ Slane and District History Society https://slanehistoryandarchaeologysociety823029674.wordpress.com/ Meath County Council – Hill of Slane https://www.meath.ie/discover/heritage/heritage-sites/hill-of-slane Read more on our website: https://irelandinsideandout.com/ Please support the channel: Buy Me A Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/rdscallyN Music: Highland Hymn - Bonnie Grace Celtic Blessing - Bonnie Grace Tudor - Bonnie Grace #ireland #irishhistory #irish #history #HillOfSlane #stpatrick #earlychristian #saintpatrick #saintpatricksday #meath
Tag Archives: Irish history
The Tower of Power – Roodstown Castle: Inside A Fortified Tower House In The Dublin Pale – County Louth, Ireland
Chapters: 00:00 intro 00:50 The Pale 01:21 Tower House subsidy and building boom 01:33 Ardee Castle – Ireland’s largest Tower House 02:50 A look inside from the northwest side. 03:40 Another look inside O4:08 View of the vaulted ceiling storeroom 04:31 Stone Spiral Staircase 04:59 The murder hole 05:15 Castle features 05:58 Site of forge and blacksmith shop
Roodstown Castle is a 15th-century fortified tower house and National Monument located in County Louth, Ireland.
Tower houses were fortified residencies of Irish rural gentry built during the 15th and 17th centuries. Roodstown Castle is associated with the Taaffe family, who were active in the area until the 17th century.
In the mid-fifteenth century men loyal to the English crown living in the Dublin (English) Pale were offered a £10 annual government subsidy to construct a fortified house within the Pale. £10 may not sound like a lot, but in the mid-15th century this was enough money to buy 13 horses or 25 cows or pay a skilled craftsman for almost a year. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/c…
Thanks to the subsidy, numerous tower houses were built win the Pale during the 15th century. Pioneering Irish historian and archeologist Harold G. Leask estimated that more 2500 tower house may have been built in Ireland. There are similar structures in Scotland.
There are 26 tower houses in Co. Louth. Roodstown may have been one of these subsidized tower houses. Roodstown Castle shows the original owners’ wealth and the builders’ craftsmanship six hundred years ago.
The castle’s detailed window and door openings are testament to the skills and craftmanship of the area’s stone workers.
Subsidized or not Roodstown Castle sits at a strategic location between the River Glyde, River Dee, Ardee and the Irish Sea. Roodstown Castle is considered an excellent example of a surviving tower house since its original outside structure is still intact.
Constructed of rubble masonry with limestone trim, Roodstown Castle is a rectangular four-story tower house with small turrets at diagonally opposed corners.
There is a spiral stairway in the southeast side and garderobes in the northwest. The castle contained a vaulted ground-floor cellar or storage space, a murder-hole, a crenelated parapet, chemin de ronde.
The upper floors have large ogee arch windows and fireplaces. The roof and timber floors above the ground floor no longer exist. Roodstown Castle was occupied during a tumultuous period of history. The nearby town of Ardee, which has its own significant tower house, Ardee Castle, suffered mightily during this time.
Roodstown Castle is located 3.6 km (2.2 mi) north-northeast of Ardee. There is no access to the inside of the castle for safety reasons and the main gate to field where the castle is located is frequently locked. https://www.geograph.ie/photo/881262
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Sources:
Dolan and Murray, n.d., p.75 in Mitchell, Frank & Tuite Breeda, ‘The Great Bog of Ardee’, Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society, 1993, Vol.23 No.1, pp.7-95.
Donnolly, Colm J., ‘Frowning Ruins: The Tower Houses of Medieval Ireland,’ History Ireland, Vol. 4 No.1, Spring 1996, 11-16.
Leask, Harold G., Irish Castles and Castellated Houses, Revised 2nd ed., Dundalgan Press, Dundalk, 1951, p.75.
Mitchell, Frank & Tuite, Breeda, ‘The Great Bog of Ardee’, Journal of the County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society, 1993, Vol.23 No.1, pp.7-95.
Rowan, Alistair, ‘The Irishness of Irish Architecture’, Architectural History, 1997, Vol.40 pp.1-23. Wright, Thomas, Louthiana: Or an Introduction to the Antiquities of Ireland, 1758, Dundalk: W. Tempest Limited.
Links to further reading:
http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading…
http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls00…
http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls00…
http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls00…
http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/down-survey-…
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5008856…
https://geohive.maps.arcgis.com/apps/…
http://irishantiquities.bravehost.com…
https://www.libraryireland.com/topog/…
https://www.logainm.ie/ga/1165428?s=r…
https://www.logainm.ie/ga/33627
https://theirishaesthete.com/tag/rood…
#ireland #irish #irishhistory #countylouth #medievalireland #medievalcastle #thepale #englishhistory #towerhouse #irishcastle #ardee #roodstown
The Secrets of The Hill of Faughart: A Saint, a King and 3 Epic Battles!
Here a saint was born. A king was killed. A vanquished chieftain lost his head. Three major battles were fought.
There’s a centuries-old cemetery, a ruined medieval church and a holy well that attracts pilgrims from around the world. There’s even the remains of an iron age Norman-style motte-castle.
Here is the Hill of Faughart.
Located just north of Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland, the Hill of Faughart has a lot of Irish myth and history going on in one fairly small site.
The hill itself is in a natural position to become an important place. Occupied since prehistoric times, Faughart was strategically important for centuries.
Faughart overlooks the Gap of the North/Moyry Pass — eastern Ireland’s main south-north route — Dundalk and its bay, the Cooley mountains and Slieve Gullion to its north. It has a clear view north and east of a large area.
The remains of an iron age, Norman-style earth-and-wood motte-castle stand to northeast of the cemetery, evidence of Faughart’s strategic location.
Even by Irish stands Faughart is steeped in history. It is the birthplace of St. Brigid, 451 AD. It is the burial place High King of Ireland Edward Bruce who was killed near here 14 October 1318.
St. Brigid is Ireland’s female patron saint. Sharing a name with a popular Celtic pagan goddess, Brigid is the bridge between paganism and Irish Christianity. Few historical facts are known about St. Brigid’s life, but she is an extremely popular saint both in Ireland and around the world.
There are three sites related to St. Brigid at the Hill of Faughart. The most significant site is St. Brigid’s Holy Well.
The holy well attracts pilgrims who believe the well’s water has healing powers. The second is St. Brigid’s Bed, said to be the remains of a hut where she slept. The third site is St. Brigid’s Pillar.
This site appears to be the remains of the base of a round tower that once existed there. In the center of the circle is a piece of a broken Celtic high cross. A church has existed on the Faughart since at least the 4th century and monastery once existed there. The ruined church in the graveyard dates from the 12th century.
A rag tree grows above the holy well. Pilgrims leave various votive offerings, often strips of cloths or rags, in hopes of healing ailments or being granted answers to prayers.
Faughart was at the center of three significant battles. In 248 AD, a battle was fought by Cormac Ulfada, High King of Ireland, against Storno (Starno), king of Lochlin (Scandinavia). Ulfada prevailed.
Legend has it that the defeated Storno was allowed to sail home to Scandinavia. https://books.google.com/books?id=NSE…
In 732 AD, Áed Allán, king of Ireland, fought a battle with Áed Róin, king of Ulaid, over what amounted to an insult to a parish controlled by a powerful bishop[. 2]https://books.google.com/books?id=NSE…
Áed Róin was vanquished and wound up having his head cut off on The Stone of Decapitation (Cloch-an-chommaigh) in the doorway of the church of Faughart. A number of other chieftains in Áed Róin’s army were also killed.
Today there are several stones near the entrance of church. It was unclear when we visited which stone was THE Stone of Decapitation. If you know the answer please let us know in the comments.
Perhaps the most significant Battle of Faughart was fought 14 October 1318 between Hiberno-Norman forces led by John de Bermingham, 1st Earl of Louth, and Edmund Butler, Earl of Carrick and his Scots-Irish army commanded by Edward Bruce.
Bruce was the brother of Robert Bruce, King of Scots, Edward Bruce has been backed as King of Ireland by some Irish chieftains. Butler’s army was defeated. Bruce was killed. His body was quartered and sent to various towns in Ireland. His head was sent to King Edward II in England.
Thus, it is hard to know what, if any parts of Bruce, are actually buried in the grave at Faughart. The Battle of Faughart was part of the First War of Scottish Independence, during a three-year era known as the Irish Bruce Wars. Bruce’s death ended an attempt to revive the High Kingship of Ireland.
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Bunratty Castle and Folk Park: Top Irish Tourist Destination
Brunratty Castle and Folk Park
#irish #castle #irishhistory #bunratty #countyclare #ireland
Bunratty Castle is a large 15th-century tower house in County Clare, Ireland. https://www.bunrattycastle.ie/
The castle and adjoining folk park are one of Ireland’s top tourist attractions. The current structure is the forth castle to occupy the site.
This one was built by the MacNamara family after around 1425. At around 1500, Bunratty Castle came into the hands of the O’Briens (or O’Brians), dominate clan in Munster and later Earls of Thomond. They expanded the site and eventually made it their seat.
In 1720 the O’Breins sold the site. By the late 1800s the castle had fallen into disrepair. In 1956, the castle was purchased and restored by Standish Vereker, 7th Viscount Gort, with assistance from Ireland’s Office of Public Works.
Bunratty Castle opened to the public in 1960, with sporting furniture, tapestries and works of art dating to around the 1600’s.
A folk park, preserving traditional Irish homes, from the humblest to the most prosperous, has been developed on the 240 acres around the castle.
Today the property is run by Shannon Heritage a company that also operates tourist attractions Craggaunowen – The Living Past Experience, Co Clare, Knappogue – Co Clare, Dunguaire Castle, Co Galway. https://www.shannonheritage.com/about…
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Marconi Was Irish
Guglielmo Marconi was IRISH.
Irish!? Wait.
Guglielmo Marconi. One of the most famous Italians of modern times. How could he be Irish?
OK. Guglielmo Marconi was HALF Irish.
Marconi’s mother was Anne Jameson. Annie Jameson of Daphne Castle in County Wexford, Ireland. She was a granddaughter of John Jameson, founder of whiskey distillers Jameson & Sons.
Marconi was born into the Italian nobility.
Annie Jameson was an aspiring opera singer. She travelled to Italy to study.
She met and married widower Giuseppe Marconi, an Italian aristocrat, while in Italy.
Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marcon was born 25 April 1874 in Bologna, Italy. Living at Villa Griffone, near Bologna,.
Guglielmo Marconi was educated at home by a series of tutors. He spent time Ireland as youth and as child lived in England for about four years with his mother.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/world/n…
While teenager, Marconi began working on ‘wireless telegraphy’.
Summer of 1895, Guglielmo, 21, made his first wireless over land transmission of 3 kilometers at Villa Griffone.
And radio was born.
Italy uninterested in Marconi’s work.
But England was.
In 1896 he traveled to London.
Sir William Preece, the chief electrical engineer of the British Post Office, supported Marconi’s work.Soon it was being tested by engineers
In 1987, Marconi made his first wireless transmission over the sea.
A test between Ballycastle and Rathlin Island off the County Antrim coast for insurance company Lloyds of London took place In 1898. This was the first commercial wireless telegraph transmission.
At the turn of the 20th century, Marconi began investigating sending transatlantic wireless messages to compete with the undersea telegraph cables.
Marconi set up wireless transmitting stations in Ireland and Canada to compete with transatlantic telegraph cables.
Marconi established a wireless transmitting station at Marconi House, Rosslare Strand, County Wexford, in 1901 to act as a link between Poldhu in Cornwall, England, and Clifden in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland.
Regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service begun on 17 October 1907 between Clifden, Co. Galway, Ireland, and Glace Bay.
Marconi won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909.
The first trans-Atlantic wireless telephone conversation between Ballybunion, Co. Kerry and Louisburg, Nova Scotia took place in 1919.
On 17 December 1902, a transmission from Marconi’s station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, became the first radio message to cross the Atlantic from North America to Europe.
Marconi and his wireless are credited with the rescue of the 706 survivors of the Titanic’s sinking. The Titanic’s radio operators – Harold Bride and Jack Philips – were Marconi Company employees. Radio contact with the Cunard liner the Carpathia led to the rescue of the Titanic survivors.
Bride survived the Titanic disaster but was badly injured. Philips, the wireless operator on duty the night of the sinking, did not.
Marconi had been offered free passage on Titanic’s maiden voyage. But he had taken the Lusitania, which would be sunk by German U-boats in 1915, to New York.
Marconi also had another personal connection to Ireland.
While in England, he met Beatrice O’Brien (1882–1976), a daughter of Edward Donough O’Brien, the 14th Baron Inchiquin.
Beatrice O’Brien and Marconi were married 16 March 1905. They had three daughters and a son.
The Marconi family returned to Italy In 1913, joining Rome’s high society. Beatrice became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elena.
Marconi and Beatrice divorced in 1924. Marconi had the marriage annulled in 1927 so he could remarry in the Catholic Church.
Marconi joined the joined the Italian Fascist party in 1923, just as the party rose to power.
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who used radio to spread the Fascist message, was Marconi’s best man when he married Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali in 1927.
In 1930, Mussolini made Marconi president of the Royal Academy of Italy, and a member of the Fascist Grand Council. Marconi was an advocate of fascist ideology.
He personally ensured that Jews were not appointed to the scientific society during his time as president. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200…
In 1937, while developing microwave technology, Marconi had a series of nine heart attacks.
He died in Rome on 20 July 1937, age 63.
Marconi’s remains are interred in an elaborate mausoleum adjacent to the 17th-century Villa Griffone/Villa Marconi, located in Pontecchio Marconi, outside Bologna in Emilia Romagna, Italy.
He didn’t not look like it or act like it. But Marconi was half Irish.
Spanish Armada Wreck On Streedagh Beach, Co. Sligo, Ireland
Spanish Armada Wreck At Streedagh Beach
On 21 September 1588, three damaged vessels of the Spanish Armada were blown ashore during a violent storm on Streedagh Beach in what is now County Sligo, Ireland.
The three ships were carracks, armed merchant ships.
The three ships were the La Lavia (25 guns), a Venetian merchantman and the vice-flagship; La Juliana (32 guns) a Catalan merchantman; and Santa Maria de Vison (de Biscione) (18 guns) a Ragusan merchantmen.
The ships were 3 of 28 from the Spanish Armada, part of an unsuccessful attempt to invade England, that had fled to the Irish coastline after the invasion plan collapsed in August 1588. The three ships retreated to the west coast of Ireland and were anchored about a mile offshore when a major storm began.
On 21 September, the ships’ anchor cables gave way in heavy seas. When the storm began on 17 September all three ships were already in serious trouble.All three were heavily damaged from battle in the English channel.
All three had cut their main anchors to flee the English fleet when the battle of Battle of Gravelines began.
Having no main anchors made anchoring near to shore difficult. When the ships hit the shore, they broke apart in less than hour.
Accounts differ by about 1,800 men drowned, according to an account by Captain Francisco de Cuellar, one of the few survivors.
Approximately 300 made it ashore.“ ..and not being able to weather round or double Cape Clear, in Ireland, on account of the severe storm which arose upon the bow, he was forced to make for the land with these three ships, which, as I say, were of the largest size, and to anchor more than half a league from the shore, where we remained for four days without being able to make any provision, nor could it even be made.
On the fifth day there sprang up so great a storm on our beam, with a sea up to the heavens, so that the cables could not hold nor the sails serve us, and we were driven ashore with all three ships upon a beach, covered with very fine sand, shut in on one side and the other by great rocks. The likes of this had never been seen for, within the hour, our three ships broke up completely, with less than three hundred men surviving.
Over a thousand drowned among them many important people, captains, gentlemen and regular officers….many men drowned inside the ships, while others jumped into the water never to come up again.” — Captain Francisco de Cuellar
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i…
Once ashore, most of the survivors were attacked by locals and robbed of everything, including their clothes, or they were attacked by English soldiers and slaughtered. De Cuellar managed to survive a number of encounters with robbers and the English.The late sixteenth century. and 1588 in particular, was marked by unusually strong North Atlantic storms.
Most of the 28 Spanish ships lost in the storms were along the jagged steep rocks of the western coast of Ireland.
About 5,000 men died by drowning, starvation and slaughter by local inhabitants after their ships were driven ashore on the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland.
English soldiers in Ireland were ordered to kill any Spanish prisoners, England’s Lord Deputy William FitzWilliam instead of asking for ransom as was common during that period.
The locations of the wrecks were discovered in 1985.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqCs-… and some other artifacts were recovered in 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOyas… The local community commemorates the event each year on the third weekend in September. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj5jx… Armada In Irelandhttps://spanisharmadaireland.com/
Who Is Buried in Yeats’ Grave?
William Butler Yeats, renowned Irish poet, playwright and writer, winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature, is buried in St. Columba’s church graveyard in Drumcliff (sometimes spelled Drumcliffe) in County Sligo, Ireland.
Or is he?
Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939. He was 73.[1] Yeats was buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin following a discreet and private funeral.
But Yeats’s family wanted him buried in Ireland, in the graveyard of the neo-Gothic style St. Columba’s, where his great grandfather had been rector.
Attempts were made in France to dissuade the family from relocating the remains to Ireland due to the uncertainty of their identity.
Yeats’s body was exhumed in 1946 and transferred to the cemetery’s ossuary and mixed with other remains.[2] French Foreign Ministry authorities were worried about the fact that Yeats’ remains were thrown into a communal grave.[7]
Yeats’ wish was that he be buried quickly in France. According to his wife, George, “His actual words were ‘If I die, bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo’.”[3]
Positively identified or not, in September 1948, nine years after his death, Yeats’s remains were moved to the graveyard of St Columba’s.[4]
The remains buried in Drumcliff, Co. Sligo, may – or may not – be those of William Butler Yeats.
The man in charge of repatriating the poet’s remains for the Irish Government was Seán MacBride, Minister of External Affairs, the son of Maud Gonne MacBride, who was one of Yeats’s former lovers. [5][6]
Yeats married 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees, known as George, in 1917. He was 51. Despite their age difference and Yeats’ affairs with other women, the couple remained married. They had two children, Anne and Michael. Georgie once wrote to her husband “When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were.”
The epitaph carved into Yeats’s tombstone in Drumcliff is from “one of his final poems Under Ben Bulben”:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by!
1. Obituary. “W. B. Yeats Dead Archived 28 September 2013 at the Wayback Machine”. The New York Times, 30 January 1939. 2. Jordan, Anthony J. (2003). W. B. Yeats: Vain, Glorious, Lout – A Maker of Modern Ireland. Westport Books. ISBN 978-0-9524447-2-5.3. Foster, R. F. (2003). 3. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-818465-2. 4. Foster, 2003
5. Jordon, 20036.
6. Cahill, Christopher (December 2003). “Second Puberty: The Later Years of W. B. Yeats Brought His Best Poetry, along with personal melodrama on an epic scale”. theatlantic.com. Archived from the original on 29 August 2021. 7. “The Documents”. The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 9 November 2017.
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