1318 — the day the Normans lost Clare
The Battle of Dysert O'Dea
Richard de Clare — lord of Thomond, determined to hold what his father had taken — rode into the Burren in the spring of 1318 to put down an O'Brien and O'Dea revolt. He met Conor O'Dea's forces at Dysert and was killed. His army collapsed. The Normans had been consolidating in Clare for forty years; after Dysert O'Dea they never recovered the initiative. The Anglo-Norman push into Clare was effectively finished that afternoon. The castle and church ruins at Dysert are where it happened, four kilometres from where you're standing.
The widow of Leamaneh Castle
Máire Rua of Leamaneh
Máire Rua O'Brien — Máire of the Red Hair — married Conor O'Brien in 1639 and moved to Leamaneh Castle on the road west toward Kilfenora. When Conor died fighting the Cromwellians in 1651, she is said to have ridden to the English garrison and offered to marry a Cromwellian officer to protect her estate and her children's inheritance. She found one willing. The stories about her — throwing servants from windows, the subsequent marriages — run well beyond what can be verified, but the castle is real and the ruin is worth stopping for. She knew what she was doing in a time when doing nothing meant losing everything.
Eighth century, still visible
St Tola's Monastery
St Tola founded a monastic settlement at Dysert O'Dea in the eighth century. What remains is a round tower (twelfth century, the top rebuilt in the 1800s), a Romanesque doorway with carved heads around the arch, and the White Cross of Tola — a high cross with a carved Christ figure on one face and abstract Celtic patterns on the other. The cross is a replica; the original moved to the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. The site is quiet, free to enter, and rarely busy. The stonework on the doorway is worth getting close to.
Five million names, one Georgian church
The Clare Heritage Centre
Catherine Keightley built St Catherine's Church in 1718. She was a first cousin to Queen Mary and Queen Anne, which explains the quality of the stonework. The church held services until the twentieth century. It's now the Clare Heritage Centre — a genealogy archive and museum focused on the famine and emigration period 1800–1860. An estimated two million people left Clare during and after the famine. Many of their descendants eventually find their way back here, to a church built by an English noblewoman, to look at Irish names on a screen. The building is good; the research service is genuine; the experience of finding a name is something you either understand or you don't.