Qualla: County Limerick

County Limerick: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The county takes its name from a city that takes its name, possibly, from an Irish word meaning 'the flat area.' Stand at the right angle, the Mullaghareirk Mountains rolling off west toward Kerry and the Galtees rising blue to the southeast, and you can see what the ancient namers meant. County Limerick is a fertile limestone bowl ringed by green hills, with the wide brown coil of the Shannon at its northern edge and a thousand cattle in the dairy fields of the Golden Vale to the east. People settled here, near Lough Gur, by 3000 BCE. They never left. The kingdoms that ruled the bowl changed - Uí Fidgenti, then Norman, then Tudor, then Free State - but the limestone, the cows, and the poetry stayed.

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County Limerick: A Land Shaped by Water

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Geography first. County Limerick sits in the province of Munster, in Ireland's Mid-West, bordered by Kerry to the west, Clare to the north, Tipperary to the east, and Cork to the south. The River Shannon - the longest river in Ireland - runs through Limerick city and widens immed...

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County Limerick: Five Thousand Years of Settlement

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At Lough Gur, southeast of Limerick city, archaeologists have found evidence of continuous human occupation going back 5,000 years. The Grange Stone Circle nearby is the largest stone circle in Ireland - 113 stones, raised about 2200 BCE, still standing in a field where the dairy...

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County Limerick: Vikings, Normans, Sieges

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Vikings founded Limerick city around 922, on an island in the Shannon. The O'Briens of Dál gCais drove them out, then dominated the region until the Norman invasion. In 1210 the Anglo-Norman crown formally established the County of Limerick and granted the lands of the old Uí...

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County Limerick: The Poets of the Maigue

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Catholic majority of County Limerick lived under Penal Law oppression and rural poverty. The famine of the 1840s emptied villages and accelerated the decline of Irish as a daily language. But in towns along the River Maigue - Croom,...

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County Limerick: Modern Limerick

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After Irish independence the county lived through its own Civil War in 1922 - the Battle of Kilmallock saw some of the war's hardest line fighting. In the twentieth century, Limerick became known for its dairy farming, its rugby clubs (Munster Rugby plays at Thomond Park, and the...

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