The hermitage in the name
An Díseart
Díseart is one of the oldest place-elements in Ireland - a hermitage or hermit's retreat, taken from the Latin desertum, a solitary place. It marks somewhere an early Christian monk went to live alone or with a small handful of companions, away from the bigger monastic settlements. St Colman is the name attached to the abbey said to have stood here, which by the later medieval period was a house of Conventual Franciscans. There are Dysarts and Diserts scattered across the island, and most of them, like this one, have lost almost all visible trace of the original cell. There are remains of an old church and a cemetery in the parish; the rest is under grass.
A war depot taken, lost and taken again
The island fort of 1641
One of the islands belonging to Dysart was fortified by the Irish at the close of the civil war of 1641 and made one of their chief depositories. It was taken by the English under terms, then re-taken by the Irish, who made the English garrison prisoners, before it finally surrendered to a superior force. It is the kind of small, vicious episode that the bigger histories skip and that the lake islands of the midlands are full of. Nobody has put up a sign.
Jonathan Swift on Lough Ennell
Lilliput across the water
Jonathan Swift was a guest of the Rochforts at the south end of Lough Ennell in the 1720s, at a spot the family called Lilliput. The story local to the lake, and not seriously contested, is that Swift took the name with him when he sat down to write Gulliver's Travels and turned it into the kingdom of tiny people. The Lilliput shore is across the water from Dysart, signposted now as the Lilliput Adventure Centre. If you are in Dysart with an hour to spare, the drive around to Lilliput and back along the lake is the local outing.