Feenagh
Fíodhnach, Co. Limerick

A quiet west Limerick farming village that grew up around its church, with ring forts in the fields and a hurling club at its heart.

Feenagh sits in west County Limerick, in flat green farming country roughly ten miles from Newcastle West and six from Dromcolliher. The name comes from the Irish Fíodhnach, a wooded place, though the woods are long gone and the land around it is now cattle and dairy. It is a small village - a church, a former school, a handful of houses - in the joined parish of Feenagh-Kilmeedy. There is not much in the way of tourist infrastructure here, and the village does not pretend otherwise.

The village is younger than it looks. People farmed this ground for thousands of years - there are ring fort sites in the townland to prove it - but the village of Feenagh itself only grew up in the late 18th century, around the church. When the old parish of Castletown Conyers was divided in the 1840s, Feenagh and Kilmeedy were joined into one parish, and the first parish priest took up the post in 1842. The church, school and library that still mark the centre of the village all date from that century of growth.

The heart of the place is St Ita's Catholic Church, originally 18th century and substantially rebuilt in 1877. The other landmarks tell the same story of a working village looking after its own: the national school of 1847, now the community centre, and a Carnegie library built in 1917, one of the small grant-funded libraries that went up across Ireland in those years. The old creamery from the 1890s is now a garage.

Come to Feenagh if you want an honest west Limerick village going about its business, not a day out built for visitors. The pull of the place is the parish and the GAA club, the lanes and the ring forts, and the quiet. For food, beds and shops, Newcastle West and Dromcolliher are the nearby towns.