Qualla: Lorrha

Lorrha: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Jgillett, Public domain. In an alcove of a stone wall in Lackeen Castle, a Norman keep just outside the small Tipperary village of Lorrha, a manuscript lay hidden for centuries. It was an early medieval missal - a book containing the prayers and chants of the Mass - written in Latin and Old Irish, illuminated in the spare confident style of ninth-century Irish monks, and at some point during the religious turmoil of the seventeenth century walled up by the Kennedys of Lackeen for safekeeping. In the eighteenth century it was found again. It is now called the Stowe Missal and is the oldest surviving complete Latin liturgy from Ireland, perhaps from anywhere in the Latin West. It was made at Lorrha.

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Image: User:Jgillett | Public domain

Lorrha: The kingdom of the deer

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before the Stowe Missal was written, Lorrha was a monastic settlement of the kingdom of Síol Anmchadha. The monastery was founded in the sixth century by Ruadhán of Lorrha - born Ruadán mac Fergusa Birn, later canonised - one of the so-called Twelve Apostles of Ireland train...

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lorrha: 843: Turgesius comes upstream

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David P Howard, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 843 a Norse expedition led by Turgesius - or Turgéis in the Norse, Thorgest probably in his original tongue - raided Lorrha and the neighbouring monastery at Terryglass. Turgesius had come up the Shannon system with his ships, exploiting the fact that the great Irish river was...

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Image: David P Howard | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lorrha: Walter de Burgh, the Dominicans, and the Augustinians

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the thirteenth century, after the Anglo-Norman invasion, Walter de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, founded a Dominican Friary on the south side of Lorrha. Its ruined nave, 120 feet long and 24 wide, still stands - the west gable's Gothic window held up to a considerable height above th...

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Lorrha: What Cromwell may have done

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Thacker, CC BY-SA 2.0. Local tradition holds that Cromwell's army visited Lorrha in 1650 and committed sacrilegious acts in the abbey - that broken crosses still standing in the churchyard date from that visit, that the abbey was unroofed and burned, that the abbey's silver bell-clapper was carried awa...

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Image: Jonathan Thacker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lorrha: Martin O'Meara of Sharragh

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Garry Dickinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 9 August 1916, near Pozières on the Somme, Sergeant Martin O'Meara of the 16th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, was awarded the Victoria Cross for repeatedly going out under fire to bring in wounded soldiers and ammunition over four consecutive days. O'Meara had been born...

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Image: Garry Dickinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lorrha: What you see today

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Ford Elliott, CC BY 2.0. Lorrha is small - a handful of houses, two churches (Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland), a pub, a national school. The Roman Catholic Church of St Ruadhan, dating from around 1912, sits on the main road. The Church of Ireland church stands on the site of an earlier church buil...

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Image: Steve Ford Elliott | CC BY 2.0