Qualla: Glangevlin

Glangevlin: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the ice age ended, Ireland's glaciers retreated north. The last one held out longest at Glangevlin, a remote valley in the northwest corner of County Cavan, hemmed in between the Cuilcagh Mountains and Sliabhan-Iarainn. According to local tradition and supporting geological evidence, this was the last place in Ireland, and in western Europe outside Iceland, where a glacier lasted from the Ice Age. Maybe it was the same isolation that preserved the language: Irish was spoken here as a community tongue until the 1930s, one of the last places in Cavan where this was commonplace. Glangevlin holds an unusually rich layer of mythology, history and harp music for a parish of forty-two townlands and not many more permanent residents.

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Glangevlin: The Cow That Made a Gap

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Gap of Glan, the dramatic cleft that gives the valley its character, was supposedly created by a cow. The cow in question was Glas Ghaibhleann, the celebrated magical cow of Irish mythology, white with green spots, whose inexhaustible supply of milk signalled prosperity. MacK...

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Glangevlin: Eight Centuries of Glen-Gaibhle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Glangevlin appears in writing for the first time around 1180, in a poem called Acallam na Senorach where the warrior Cailte mac Ronain meets Saint Patrick and tells him tales of the Fianna. In one tale, Fionn mac Cumhaill is captured by High King Cormac mac Airt, and Cailte must ...

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Glangevlin: Turlough's Lament

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In early 1708 the most famous Irish harpist of his era, Turlough O'Carolan, was travelling from Fermanagh to Mayo when a snowstorm caught him in Glangevlin. He and his guide took shelter in what he later described as 'a miserable cabin,' where they waited several days for the sno...

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Glangevlin: John O'Donovan's Visit

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In May 1836, the great Irish scholar John O'Donovan visited Glangevlin for the Ordnance Survey. He left an extraordinary record of what he found. 'After having procured a kind of a dinner at the head Inn of Swanlinbar,' he wrote, 'we directed our course southwestwards for about t...

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Glangevlin: What the Townlands Remember

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Glangevlin parish contains forty-two named townlands, each a small unit of land that has carried its name for centuries. Altnasheen, Altshallan, Bellavally Lower, Bellavally Upper, Bursan, Carnmaclean. Their names, mostly in Irish, describe slope, hill, valley, ridge, mountain pa...

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