Westkopp — Forests of the Counties of the Lower Shannon Valley. 27l 



These notes, collected during a quarter of a century, are, of course, 

 extremely fragmentary, especially for the early period ; for it was no object of 

 monk, bard, or historian to tell more than incidentally of the great forests 

 among which lay the theatre of their heroes' actions. Nevertheless, much 

 may be learned in such stray gleams of light ; while even fiction, with its 

 extraordinary setting of painfully accurate topography, is not to be passed 

 by ; and the " Mesca Ulad " may yield us hints as illuminative as those in 

 graver works. The names of places tell us much ; could we fix their age, 

 they should be some of our most reliable evidence. Many are doubtless very 

 early ; but we can at best only fix their minimum of age. 



County Clare. 



(2) Let us briefly give the physical features of the northern county. Its 

 eastern side contains the two mountain tracts of Aughty, or Slieve Boughty, 

 and Slieve Bernagh, caps of sandstone and slate, rising high above the limestone 

 plains. The western has also two ; the Burren, an upland of limestone 

 sloping southward, and Mount Callan, which dominates all the shale land in 

 the south-western reach of the country. Of these, the highest points of the 

 first are 1,315 feet above the sea near Lough Ea, and 1,026 feet at Cappabaun. 

 In Slieve Bernagh two points are over 1,740 feet high; in Burren, Slieve 

 Elva and Slieve Carran are both 1,074 feet high ; the hill above Black Head 

 is only 6 feet lower. Much of the rest is from 700 to 900 feet high. Callan 

 is 1,287 feet high. Few of the other hills exceed 500 feet above the sea. 

 Large tracts of low, rich grass-land, with drift hills, occupy most of the 

 eastern " half," while moors and bogs, with broad borders of better land along 

 the sea and the great rivers, occupy the south-western part from Inagh to 

 Kilrush. 



One first turns to the Annals before the Norman Conquest ; but they tell us 

 very little. We will next see what the place-names may teach us.^ 



(3) NOKTH-AVESTERN Clark. Treclcss as are now the heights of Burren, 

 it is evident that formerly, as now, a certain amount of timber grew, not only 

 in the deep valleys, but far up in the mountain slopes. We first notice 

 Killoghil, near Ballyvaughan ; the name, like Eoghil in Aran, possibly refers 

 to the oak rather than the yew. Headers of the Dindseanchas'^ may recall the 

 great oak, " Eog Mughna," in Westmeath, and " Eo " in other cases is 

 undoubtedly used for the oak. Dwarf oaks still grew at the Aran site at 



1 In the diflSculty of deciding in many cases wliellier a Kill or Kyle name be " Oil" or " Coill," 

 I think it best to use only names for which the evidence is strong for their " wood " origin. 

 -Revue Celtique, 1894, p. 277. 



