A goddess, a volcano, and a church cut into the slope
Grian and the Hill of Nicker
The village takes its name from Grian, an old Irish goddess of love, who tradition placed on the Hill of Nicker two kilometres north. Nicker is the highest of a cluster of low carboniferous volcanic hills - long dead, but one of the more significant volcanic districts in Ireland - that roll on east into Kilteely-Dromkeen. Built into the hillside is the Church of Saint John the Baptist, a neo-Gothic cruciform church of around 1820, early for a Catholic church built before Emancipation, with a four-stage bell tower and an oculus window of the Four Evangelists. An outdoor Way of the Cross climbs the slope above it, laid out as a scale replica of the Stations in Jerusalem. The church sits in the Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly, not Limerick - the parish transferred from the old diocese of Emly in 1718, a reminder that the county line and the church line do not always agree.
A MacBrien tower house of c.1550, by the road, still standing
Kilduff Castle
Right beside the N24, with a pub car park alongside it, stands the ruin of Kilduff Castle - a tower house built by the MacBriens around 1550. In 1617 it passed to the Hurley family, who were dispossessed and transplanted to Connaught in the Cromwellian settlement and held it only until 1667, after which it eventually went to the Erasmus Smith charity schools. Two of its walls have collapsed and no floors remain, but a fireplace or two survive and there is a fine circular bartizan still clinging to a corner. It is fenced now for safety and there are serious cracks in the masonry. The kind of castle most people pass at sixty and never clock - which is its own quiet argument for slowing down.
Where the Williamite guns were destroyed, 1690
Sarsfield's Rock
About three miles south, near the church of Templebraden, a large rocky outcrop known as Sarsfield's Rock looks down on the ground where Patrick Sarsfield famously destroyed the Williamite siege train during the Jacobite-Williamite War in 1690 - the ammunition and guns being hauled up to batter Limerick, intercepted and blown up by Sarsfield's ride. It is one of the genuinely storied episodes of the Williamite wars, and the spur of country south of Pallasgreen is where it played out.
Old Pallas to Olympic gold, Antwerp 1920
Patrick Ryan, the Irish Whale
Patrick Ryan was born at Old Pallas, two kilometres south of the village, in 1883. He won his first Irish hammer title in 1902, beating the great Tom Kiely, emigrated to the United States in 1910, and in 1913 set a world record in the hammer throw that stood for twenty-five years. One of the famous Irish Whales - the Irish-American weight throwers who dominated the field events of the era - he won Olympic gold in the hammer and silver in the 56-pound weight at Antwerp in 1920, competing for the United States. An Olympic champion from a Limerick farm village of a couple of hundred people.