Qualla: County Offaly

County Offaly: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1556, Queen Mary signed a charter creating Ireland's first plantation counties: Queen's County to the south, named for herself, and King's County to the north, named for her husband Philip II of Spain. King's County held its name for nearly four hundred years. When the Irish Free State arrived in 1922, the county quietly went back to being Offaly - from Ui Failghe, the ancient Irish kingdom whose name had described this land since long before any English king had given his to it. The land itself, with its bogs and its rivers and its monasteries, was older than any of the names.

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County Offaly: Two Hundred Square Miles of Bog

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Offaly is largely flat. Approximately 420 square kilometers of it - twenty-one percent of the county - is peatland, more concentrated than in almost any other Irish county. The Bog of Allen extends across the eastern border into Kildare. Clara Bog, Boora Bog, Raheenmore Bog sprea...

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County Offaly: Clonmacnoise

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Around AD 545, the monk Ciaran founded a monastery on a bend in the River Shannon at Clonmacnoise. It became one of the great learning centers of medieval Europe, drawing scholars, scribes, and pilgrims for nearly a thousand years. Eight high crosses, two round towers, a ruined c...

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County Offaly: The Leviathan of Parsonstown

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In Birr, in the south of the county, William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, built a telescope in 1845 that remained the largest in the world for the next seventy-two years. He called it the Leviathan of Parsonstown. The primary mirror was six feet across - made of speculum metal...

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County Offaly: Obama and Moneygall

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Falmouth Kearney was an Offaly shoemaker who left the small village of Moneygall in 1850, the year after the famine. He sailed for New York. His descendants spread out across the American Midwest, settled in Kansas, and one of them, several generations later, gave birth to a daug...

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County Offaly: Whiskey, Golf, Hurling

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tullamore, the county town, is the home of Tullamore Dew, the second-best-selling Irish whiskey brand globally. The original distillery opened in 1829. The brand survived prohibition, the Anglo-Irish trade war, and various corporate changes; the new distillery built in 2014 is th...

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