Tuamgraney church

Of any extant building, the church at Tuamgraney, Co. Clare, is arguably the one that provides us with our most tan-gible link to Brian Boru. Tuamgraney was one of the […]

Brian’s origins and the kingdom of North Munster

In the early thirteenth-century Accallam na Senórach (‘Tales of the Elders of Ireland’) the ultimate ancestor of Brian Boru is said to have met his death in the parish of […]

Ireland in the Viking Age

We should not underrate the very real power of the Norse, and their physical and psychological impact upon the Irish people. Scholarship on the Vikings in Ireland, impressed (as we […]

Technology

The Irish had borrowed much from the Romans—brooches, pins, barrel padlocks, sickles, ploughshares, the furnace and eventually the watermill. Such borrowing was not passive. Recent excavations throw light on this. […]

What the sources say

The contemporary Annals of Ulster, recording the Battle of Tara in 980, state that ‘The battle of Temair was won by Máel Sechnaill son of Domnall against the foreigners of […]