Learn About Our Heritage
Visiting the Burren Lowlands provides you with an opportunity to explore first-hand an area of significant historic and archaeological interest. It’s also a region steeped in music and rich culture.
Start your visit in Gort, the principal town in the Lowlands. Look at buildings that have both historical and cultural links. The town takes its name from Guaire, a 6th century King of Connacht -in Irish -Gort Inse Guaire –“the field on the island of Guaire”, where he had one of his two homes, the other in Kinvara, at Dunguaire Castle.
In the Mists of Time
In the 7th Century, Colman Mac Duagh, under the patronage of King Guaire, founded the nearby monastic settlement of Kilmacduagh. It is said that King Guaire promised Colman the land and the money to build his church, so Colman walked all around South Galway looking for an appropriate site. When his belt fell to the ground, he took it as a sign from God to build his church in Kilmacduagh. The site is a hidden gem in our crown and has a stunning 12th century round tower that stands 120 feet high and leans two feet off the perpendicular. It is older than its counterpart in Pisa and is the tallest and the best-preserved tower of its kind in Ireland. St Colman’s church in Gort is named after this local saint. In 560 AD St Colman was baptised in the waters of a crystal clear fountain that miraculously appeared and still flows in the well here today. Locals have documented healings as a result of applying this water.
St Colman’s Well in Corker, photo by Galway Heritage
Stories of King Guaire are legendary. One such is the Flight of the Dishes. It is said that whenever he sat down to eat, King Guaire said grace. It was a simple entreaty in keeping with his reputation as a benevolent ruler. “May the great God look down on us as we break bread together,” he would say. “And if any in my kingdom are more in need than I, then I pray they have this bounteous food to sustain them; and welcome.”
Those prayers were answered when, one fine day, his dishes took flight. It took place within the banquet hall of Dunguaire Castle –sometime during an Easter Sunday. As the legend unfolds, at the same time, prayers rose from the heart of the Burren from a hermit called Colman MacDuagh. Colman was cousin to the King, though he could scarce be recognized as royalty. He was ragged and hungry. Here in the heart of the Burren it was not likely his stomach would soon be filled, as all that was available to him was a small meal of plants and tubers. Colman did not mind such meagre fare.
It was entirely different for his servant, a young man who had lost so much weight the bones were sticking out through his skin. He felt near death and he was far from happy that his last hours were to be spent in an alien landscape. Colman was not blind to his servant’s condition and offered this prayer: “Let this poor child be fed, and fed well, if it be thy will.” Colman’s supplication floated above the Burren and over the grey-blue limestone rocks. It met and mingled with that of Guaire. Both prayers were answered. The windows blew open, and the dishes flew out of Dunguaire to the shelter of Colman MacDuagh and his servant. The rest is, as they say, history!
Later centuries were not as kind.
A Time of Conquest
After the execution of England’s King Charles I in 1649, many of Charles’ English supporters fled to Ireland. The new English Republic sent Oliver Cromwell to Ireland from 15 August 1649 to 26 May 1650 to declare Ireland under British rule. In that short time, Cromwell accomplished a more complete control of Ireland than had been achieved under any English monarch; and it led on to the most ruthless process of ethnic cleansing that there has ever been in western European history, with the arguable exception of the Norman Conquest.
Cromwell passed a series of Penal Laws against Roman Catholics (the vast majority of King Guaire’s clan and who were evicted from their properties). Under these laws the Irish people were forbidden from speaking Gaelic (Irish language) or playing Irish music. The land owned by the Irish was confiscated in all but the poor area west of the River Shannon, which included much of the Burren Lowlands. The order “To hell or to Connaught” gave full warning that any who remained would be put to the sword.
A plaque at gate of Bully’s Acre famine graveyard, photo by Bernice Forde Carolan
By 1793, the “Roman Catholic Relief” Act allowed Catholics some return of civil rights by taking an oath to become “qualified” individuals. In Gort, 40 men took the oath. For more information, see In Gort 1793: The Qualifying and Relieving Year in County Galway’s Southerly Town, printed in August 2019, by Steve Dolan, then director of the Portumna Workhouse, which outlines the changes that qualifying had on the area.
In the 1830s national schools were created across Ireland to educate people through the medium of the English language. Speaking Irish was strictly forbidden in schools but, while spoken at home, this too was strongly discouraged and shamed. This attitude extended to all aspects of Irish culture, including our traditional Irish music which can trace its origins back to when the Celts arrived in Ireland 2000 years ago.
That music began as an oral tradition, listened to and learned by ear without any recording on paper. Emigrants leaving Ireland took their songs and music with them across the world. While Irish, the language of people in Ireland, was forbidden in the 1800s, its use in song continued. The importance of Irish music and song is still recognized today in the wonderful traditional and classical performances by young local musicians in both Comhaltas and Coole Music as well as our festivals.
You cannot visit the west of Ireland in particular, without some understanding of one of the darkest periods of our history – the Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852. The Famine was a watershed period in Ireland’s history resulting in the deaths or emigrations of approximately 3 million people. This emigration contributed to the decline in Irish as a spoken language as the need to learn English was essential to get on in the USA or UK. Emigration and death resulted in such a sharp decline of the Irish language that the 1851 census notes that there were just over one and a half million Irish speakers left.
The impact of the Famine on the Burren Lowlands region is still visible to this day.
In Gort, the Old Fever Hospital and Bully’s Acre remain stark reminders of the local deaths. For both the native Irish and those in the ensuing diaspora, the Famine still haunts a dark corner in all our communities.
A Time of Change
In 1920, the Irish War of Independence from Britain was continuing. The dreaded Black and Tans of the British troops were based in Gort Barracks, once the castle of King Guaire. Eileen Quinn, a pregnant mother in Kiltartan, was in her own front yard in Kiltartan when for no apparent reason, she was shot by one of these troops. W.B. Yeats was outraged. In his poem, Reprisals, he wrote:
Where may new-married women sit
And suckle children now? Armed men
May murder them in passing by
Nor law nor parliament take heed.
Then close your ears with dust and lie
Among the other cheated dead.
Michael Cusack, Beagh Roots
In November 1920, a large force of Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.) and Auxiliaries swept through the Beagh area in lorries, visiting the homes of wanted men. They proceeded to Shanaglish to the home of the Loughnane brothers. Patrick (Pat), aged 29, and Harry aged 22. Pat was a member of the IRA, but had not been involved in the 1916 uprising, while Harry was a secretary of the local Sinn Féin club. The brothers were arrested, transported to barracks and never seen alive by their families again. Their bodies, when found near Drumharsna Castle in Ardrahan, showed horrible signs of torture and mistreatment. The brothers became martyrs to the IRA movement and are remembered still as heroes in Beagh at the Forge in Shanaglish.
To have greater understanding of our heritage, we have to mention sport and its place in our history and in particular, here in the Burren Lowlands. Hurling has a rich history in the area: the earliest Beagh hurler recorded was William O’Shaughnessy, dating back to the 17th century. The history of the game is steeped in the folklore and mythology of Ireland with citations as far back as 1272 BC. Hurling was taught as a skill in the art of battle and a warrior’s reputation would be known for his skill at hurling. Check out the legend of Cu Chulainn.
The Anglo-Irish gentry owned much of the land in Ireland in the 1800s and played a variety of organized games. Various types of football across Europe had evolved into rugby and soccer. Cricket was a very popular sport nationwide as many manorial estates had their own cricket pitches including Coole Park. These sports began to replace the native Irish games.
Ned Treston
The advent of the Famine also lead to a decline in hurling, even in those areas considered strongholds. The game survived in only three areas across the country, Cork, Wexford, and locally here in a stretch of east Galway, across to Loughrea and down to Portumna and Gort. Hurling matches remained a regular feature of social life of the people, while emigrants took the game to far-flung places such as America, Australia, and closer to home, Britain.
In Ireland it was time to take action to ensure our native games remained alive!
In the 1880s, Dr. Thomas W. Croke, then archbishop of Cashel, maintained that ‘ball-playing, hurling, football according to Irish rules . . . may now be said to be not only dead and buried, but in several localities to be entirely forgotten. . . What the country needs is an Irish organisation to bring order and unity to sport on a nation-wide basis.’
On the 1st of November 1884, a small group of men met in Hayes’ Hotel in Thurles, a meeting organized by two unlikely collaborators, Michael Cusack (a teacher in Lough Cutra School near Gort), and Maurice Davin, to establish a new athletics association for Ireland, the Gaelic Athletics Association or the GAA.
In the early years of the GAA, there was no specific standard for the size or weight of sliotars (hurling balls). The man credited with initial standardisation of the sliotar was Gort native, Ned Treston. He was selected to play in a match between South Galway and North Tipperary in February 1886 in Dublin. Prior to the game, there was debate between the teams regarding the size of the sliotar. Treston made a sliotar at a nearby saddler, which was used in the game, and went on to be a prototype for subsequent sliotars. The development of the GAA was rooted in wider social and economic forces: the spread of the railways, the cultural revival, the drift from land, emigration and much else. Recently, the GAA commissioned authors Mike Cronin, Mark Duncan, and Paul Rouse to write its story in The GAA: A People's History as the organization moves past its 125 year anniversary.
Hurling, Gaelic football, and Camogie are flourishing today thanks to the establishment of the GAA to ensure, “the preservation and cultivation of National pastimes," and such pastimes are at the core of our Irishness. In 2018, Hurling received international recognition when it was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In the Burren Lowlands today, both hurling and camogie arouse fierce passions and team rivalries with both sports played and supported by young and old.
Against this background of repression, Lady Augusta Gregory’s passion to renew Irish literature, especially the Irish Gaelic language, myths, and music can be recognized as a revolution for its time. To appreciate the history of Gort’s importance in the Irish Literary Renaissance, you really must start your visit with a trip to the beautiful Kiltartan Gregory Museum. W.B. Yeats himself so loved the area around Gort that he made his home in the magnificently restored 16th century tower house of Thoor Ballylee.
Visit the Past Today
Dotted around the landscape you will find evidence of life and death in Ireland stretching from prehistoric times to the present day. These include megalithic tombs, bullaun stones and holy wells, still the site of patterns and stations on feast days of local saints. In the Burren Lowlands area of Gort, Bully’s Acre is an example of a famine graveyard while Lavallylisheeen, a cillín, can visit from the Gort River Walk, can be seen by the presence of boulders or stones in fields.
Ballynastaig Soutterain
As you journey through our locality you cannot help but notice the number of tower houses and castles listed below that dot the landscape. While many lie in ruin, some are very well preserved. They all have one thing in common – a story to tell, and no one tells a story better than the Irish!!
St Manchin’s holy well, photo from Facebook
OTHER SITES OF INTEREST:
Natural/Geographic History
Geology is the key to understanding the differences between the Burren and Gort Lowlands landscapes. With its disappearing lakes known as turloughs, rivers that dive underground before reappearing elsewhere, and a limestone landscape marked by the last Ice Age, the Burren Lowlands has a natural history to fascinate all visitors.
Michael Simms, author of Exploring the Limestone Landscapes of the Burren and the Gort Lowlands, and now Senior Curator of Natural Sciences at the National Museum, NI, describes in his book the differences between landscapes of the Burren and what he called the Gort Lowlands.
The lowland karst landscape across this region, and the major karst drainage system beneath, owe their existence to processes that were operating for several million years before the Pleistocene but were significantly affected by subsequent 43 glaciations. Both the Burren and the Gort Lowlands were covered by a layer of Clare Shale. Over time, rock layers upfolded to form the Slieve Aughty mountains in the east. Erosion stripped the shale between the foot of the Burren and the Slieve Aughtys to form the Gort Lowlands, and uncovered that base of limestone, exposing it to dissolution. Sandstone beneath that was then exposed, allowing rivers to flow westwards over the limestone, where they sank beneath it, forming the extensive cave passages beneath the Gort Lowlands.
This process began long before the Burren lost its shale covering, hence the Gort Lowlands must be very much older than the Burren’s karst landscape seen now.
The landscape seen today developed over millennia and reflects continuing erosion, but it is also impacted by past and present human activity with vegetation cleared and grazed, as well as rocks used for fences, walls and living spaces.
Today, a further example of the unique natural history of the Burren Lowlands is the Coole Nature Park, as Coole Lough is a turlough. Turloughs are classified as Priority habitats under the EU Habitats Directive owing to the rarity of this habitat in a European and world context. The habitat is almost unique to Ireland. The Coole Lough turlough’s location at the centre of a unique and complex karstic aquatic system makes Coole wetland complex a site of global importance.
The extreme level of fluctuation of the lake water level, the unusual close association of the turlough with woodland, the large assemblage of wetland plant communities and the combination of interesting species associated with the lake goes to make Coole Lough the most important turlough in Ireland – and thus in the world.
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Recognizing the need for change to protect the rich biodiversity needed to survive, a Gort Biodiversity Plan came about because of the 2021 Community Biodiversity Training and Awareness Programme delivered by the Burrenbeo Trust and funded by Galway Rural Development. This culminated in each community creating a Biodiversity plan.
In Gort, the Gort Tidy Towns and Gort River Walk groups put together a local biodiversity plan, one of six local plans. Workshops on various topics were provided to give communities the skills necessary to put their plans into action.
Other communities with plans include Ardrahan, Kinvara/Ballindereen. Their plans can be found at the Biodiversity and Pollinator Resources of County of Galway Virtual Tidy Towns Project.
Creating individual plans gives each community a strong sense of ownership and agency. It reflects the unique needs of this diverse region and ensures we all play our part to protect this landscape for future generations. Each of the six plans is unique and reflects the interests, skills and needs of the local community.