Neighbours

This next stop is on private property so please just enjoy the drone footage below.

As you hit north towards Knockerra we come to our next stop. Living in the west of Ireland your neighbours are one of your most important connections. We all lean on each other in difficult times and pull together to help each other out. However in the countryside a ‘neighbour’ might not be quite next door and it is not that common to see clumps of houses together, they tend to be spread out or in lines along one side of the road. In the past these little hamlets were more common and if you look at the old pre-famine OSI maps you can see small villages existed in many places with up to 10 or 12 small houses gathered together. You can see a sample below from Tonavoher with many little collections of houses.

Many of these disappeared after the famine but as you continue up this road towards Knockerra you will meet one little clump of houses that still exists today and which has been around with thousands of years if the nearby fort has anything to say about it.

This must have been a considerably large and important ringfort at the time as from this map you can see it was a double ringed fort. We also only learned its name ‘Listeernagall’ recently as it is common to all the old maps. This most likely came from an Irish translation of something like Lios Tír na nGall, which would mean the ring fort of the country of the foreigners.