Before Saint Patrick: Tirerrill, the Ancient Landscape and the Conmaicne World
Long before Tirerrill became associated with Saint Patrick, early churches or the families that later served them, it was already an ancient and heavily marked human landscape. Its lakes, limestone ridges, sheltered valleys and mountain passages had drawn settlement for thousands of years. By the fifth century, when Christianity began to establish itself more firmly in north Connacht, those arriving with the new religion were entering a country that already possessed its own centres of population, inherited territorial divisions, burial places and sacred landmarks.
The name Tirerrill preserves the Irish Tír Oirill, earlier Tír nAilella: the territory of Ailill. In the early historical period it was associated with the Uí Ailella, a branch of the wider Connachta. The modern barony occupies much of eastern County Sligo and includes the parishes of Aghanagh, Ballysumaghan, Drumcolumb, Killadoon, Killanummery, Kilmacallan, Kilmactranny, Shancough and Tawnagh, among others. Yet this political name belongs only to the later part of the story. The landscape itself had been inhabited and invested with meaning for several millennia before the Uí Ailella appeared in surviving historical tradition.
The importance of Tirerrill begins with its geography. It lies between the open lowlands of central Connacht and the more broken country extending northward through Sligo and Leitrim. To its south and east are Lough Key, the Boyle River, the Curlew Mountains and the approaches to Lough Allen. To the west lie the routes toward Ballymote, the Owenmore valley and the lower Moy. Within the district itself, Lough Arrow forms a major inland centre, surrounded by limestone hills, productive pockets of land, marshes, streams and natural crossings.
This was not an isolated corner of prehistoric Ireland. It was a meeting place between several different environments. Communities living there could draw upon lake fisheries, woodland, grazing, arable ground and upland resources without travelling great distances. The higher ground provided visibility and refuge, while valleys and gaps channelled movement between north Roscommon, eastern Sligo, the Moy basin and the upper Shannon country. Tirerrill was therefore both a place in which communities could remain rooted and a corridor through which people, livestock, objects and beliefs could move.
A landscape shaped by ice and water
The physical character of the region was largely created during and after the last Ice Age. Glacial action left an irregular landscape of ridges, enclosed basins, exposed limestone, erratic stones and poorly drained hollows. Lough Arrow occupied one of the principal basins, while smaller lakes, marshes and streams broke the surrounding countryside into a mosaic of usable and less usable ground.
This unevenness strongly influenced settlement. The best agricultural land was not spread uniformly across the region. It occurred in pockets: on lower slopes, beside lakes, along river valleys and where deeper soils had accumulated. Early communities would therefore have selected particular places repeatedly. A dry rise overlooking water, a sheltered shelf beneath a ridge or a low hill beside a natural route could remain attractive for generations.
The lakes were not barriers in the modern sense. They were sources of food and probably lines of communication. Fish, waterfowl, reeds and wetland plants supplemented agricultural production. Islands and promontories offered protection, while rivers and lake margins helped connect one local settlement zone to another. Later crannogs belong chiefly to subsequent prehistoric and early medieval periods, but their abundance in the wider north Connacht landscape demonstrates the enduring attraction of settlement closely connected with water.
At the same time, the mountains and limestone ridges gave Tirerrill an enclosed quality. The Bricklieve Mountains rise above the Lough Arrow basin, while the Curlew country controls approaches from Boyle and Lough Key. These heights did not seal the district off. They directed movement through recognised passes. Anyone travelling between central Roscommon and southern Sligo, or between Lough Key and the country west of Lough Arrow, had to negotiate a limited number of practical routes.
Control of those routes would later have political importance, but their significance began much earlier. Seasonal herding, exchange, marriage and ritual gathering all required movement through the landscape. A community established near a pass or crossing occupied a position that was simultaneously agricultural, strategic and social.
The first farmers and the monumental landscape
The most visible evidence for early settlement around Tirerrill comes from the Neolithic period, beginning in Ireland around the fourth millennium BC. Farming communities cleared woodland, kept livestock, cultivated crops and constructed permanent monuments for the dead. Their most dramatic surviving works are the great megalithic tombs concentrated around the Bricklieve Mountains and the wider Lough Arrow–Moytura landscape.
Carrowkeel, in the Bricklieve Mountains overlooking Lough Arrow, contains one of Ireland’s major passage-tomb complexes. Its cairns were placed on high ridges from which broad areas of Sligo, Roscommon and Leitrim can be seen. The location was deliberate. These tombs were not hidden beside ordinary houses. They occupied elevated points visible across large distances, linking ancestry with the surrounding territory.
The dead placed in such monuments probably represented selected members of communities rather than the complete population. The tombs may have served as places of burial, commemoration and repeated ceremony. Their continued visibility allowed later generations to treat them as evidence that their predecessors had possessed the country. In a society without written land deeds, a monument standing above a valley could embody ancestral tenure more powerfully than any document.
The wider Moytura landscape contained an unusually varied collection of prehistoric remains. Passage tombs, court tombs, portal tombs, wedge tombs, standing stones and other megalithic structures occur within the same broad district, together with caves and striking natural boulders. This density is important. It indicates that the region was not occupied briefly by one small community. Different generations returned to the same landscape, constructing new monuments and reinterpreting older ones over a very long period.
The variety of tomb forms also suggests that the region remained connected to broader developments in prehistoric Ireland. Court tombs, passage tombs and wedge tombs belong to different traditions and periods. Their presence in the same general area reflects repeated cultural change rather than an unaltered society surviving from one age to another. New communities, or established communities adopting new customs, continued to recognise the importance of the Lough Arrow basin.
Settlement beyond the tombs
Monuments survive more readily than houses. Neolithic and Bronze Age domestic structures were commonly made from timber and other perishable materials, leaving much slighter archaeological traces than stone cairns. It would therefore be misleading to imagine that the builders lived only near the surviving tombs or that the tombs themselves reveal the complete distribution of settlement.
The inhabited landscape probably consisted of dispersed farmsteads and small communities occupying the better pockets of land. Houses required dry ground, access to water and nearby areas suitable for cattle, sheep and cultivation. Woodland remained important for fuel, building material, forage and hunting. Open grassland and cultivated fields would have expanded gradually rather than replacing the forest all at once.
The monumental ridges above Lough Arrow should therefore be understood as ceremonial centres within a larger lived countryside. The population that assembled at a tomb may have come from several neighbouring settlements. Paths between farms, lakeshore places and upland monuments would have bound the region together. Burial and ceremony helped turn separate households into a community with a shared territorial identity.
During the Bronze Age, settlement and ritual practice changed, but the district remained occupied. Wedge tombs, standing stones, cairns and other monuments show that people continued to use prominent natural locations. Metal objects and new forms of burial became part of a wider exchange world extending beyond Sligo. The old Neolithic tombs remained visible even when their original meanings had been forgotten or transformed.
By the Iron Age, the archaeological evidence becomes more difficult to interpret. Ireland has fewer securely dated domestic sites from this period than might be expected, and older monument types were sometimes reused. Nevertheless, there is no reason to imagine the Tirerrill–Lough Arrow district becoming empty. Its agricultural resources and geographical position continued to favour occupation.
What changed was the form through which communities expressed possession and authority. Great communal tomb building had ended. Settlement increasingly became associated with defended or enclosed homesteads, local lordship and control of cattle and land.
Ringforts and the growth of the enclosed farmstead
The numerous ringforts of Tirerrill belong mainly to the early medieval centuries, although some enclosed settlement traditions may have earlier roots. A ringfort was generally a circular or oval farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, or in stonier districts by a stone wall. It was not ordinarily a military fortress. It was a household centre containing dwellings, work areas, storage and livestock.
The number of ringforts throughout the district indicates an extensively occupied farming landscape. Each enclosure represented a household with a recognised claim to land and resources. Where several ringforts occur close together, they may preserve the settlement pattern of related families, neighbouring dependants or successive generations occupying slightly different sites.
Their distribution was shaped by the same geography that had attracted earlier communities. Ringforts favoured dry, moderately elevated ground with access to pasture and water. They were commonly positioned to overlook the farmed land of a household rather than to dominate an entire kingdom. Their banks marked the boundary between the domestic interior and the outside world, giving protection from animals, raiding and unwanted entry while also displaying the standing of the occupants.
The ringfort landscape therefore reveals the mature form of a settlement system that had developed from a much older agricultural population. Christianity did not create these households. The churches that later appeared in their midst depended upon communities already organised around land, kinship, cattle and inherited local authority.
A sacred landscape before Christianity
The archaeological density around Lough Arrow and Moytura also provides evidence for a deeply rooted religious landscape before Christianity. The passage tombs, cairns, caves, standing stones and remarkable natural features were almost certainly associated with beliefs and ceremonies, although their precise meanings cannot now be reconstructed.
Many of the great monuments around Lough Arrow were already ancient by the beginning of the Christian period. Their original builders had long been forgotten, but the monuments themselves remained prominent features of the landscape. Later communities did not treat them as meaningless ruins. They incorporated them into new traditions, linking cairns, caves, standing stones and unusual boulders with kings, warriors, giants and encounters with the Otherworld.
Eamonn P. Kelly’s study of the Moytura landscape shows how strongly these traditions remained tied to particular physical features. The stories were not attached loosely to the region as a whole. They gathered around recognisable hills, tombs, caves and stones, giving ancient places a continuing role in the cultural memory of the district. The explanations changed over time, but the monuments retained their authority because they remained visible reminders of a past that was already beyond ordinary recollection.
The Moytura traditions are especially important because they place conflict, kingship and supernatural intervention directly into the landscape. The second battle of Moytura was remembered as taking place in the Sligo–Roscommon borderland near Lough Arrow. Whatever the historical origin of the story, the medieval authors did not choose an empty or insignificant setting. They located the conflict among visible remains of a past that already appeared remote and heroic.
The Formaoil na Fiann landscape contained upland, rocky pasture, woodland, lakes and ancient monuments. In later Gaelic thought, such places could be understood as boundary zones associated with hunting, warriors and access to the Otherworld. The combination of marginal terrain and sacred remains helped preserve the distinctive reputation of the Moytura country long after its first monuments had been constructed.
Before Christianity, religious authority in such a district was unlikely to have been completely separated from local political leadership. Ritual specialists, poets, judges and custodians of sacred places would have operated within the society of local rulers and kin groups. Certain families may have held hereditary responsibilities connected with assembly, burial, oral tradition or the maintenance of recognised holy places.
This older structure is important when considering the later Christian landscape. The first churches did not enter a society without religious institutions. They established themselves among communities that already recognised sacred ground and hereditary authority. In some places, Christian leaders may have displaced older custodians. In others, local religious families may have entered the Christian church and continued to exercise authority in a new form.
Tirerrill and the Conmaicne
The connection between Tirerrill and the Conmaicne requires careful treatment. By the period reflected in the earliest Patrician material, Tirerrill was identified as Tír nAilella, the territory of the Uí Ailella. It would therefore be too strong to describe the entire district simply as a known Conmaicne kingdom.
The Conmaicne were not one small tribe living in a single territory. Their name was attached to several populations spread through Connacht and into the midlands. Distinct Conmaicne territories existed in Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Leitrim and Longford. Their later genealogies represented them as descendants of Conmac, although such eponymous ancestry belongs to the political and literary construction of population identity rather than demonstrable biological descent.
The important point is geographical. Tirerrill stood close to several landscapes associated with the Conmaicne. To the west and south-west lay Conmaicne populations in Mayo and the country approaching the Moy. To the south and east were Conmaicne territories in north Roscommon, Leitrim and the Shannon basin. Farther east, Conmaicne Réin extended through southern Leitrim and adjoining Longford. The Lough Arrow and Moytura district occupied a position between these western and eastern zones.
The country around Kilmactranny, Kilmacallan, Moytura and the southern approaches to Lough Arrow may therefore preserve part of a wider cultural and territorial borderland in which Conmaicne populations interacted with the Uí Ailella and other early peoples. The boundaries later presented in genealogies and territorial texts should not be imagined as permanent surveyed lines. Early kingdoms expanded, contracted and absorbed neighbouring groups. A population might retain local land while accepting a new overlord or acquiring a new pedigree.
The ecclesiastical remains close to Kilmactranny strengthen this connection with the Conmaicne world. At Knockmore, near the Roscommon boundary, two early church sites stood only about 130 metres apart. Two holy wells lay to their north. One of them, Tobercaleen, was dedicated to St Caillín, the principal saint of Fenagh and one of the most important saints associated with the Conmaicne Réin. The second, Tobermurry in Cloystuckera, was dedicated to Mary. Immediately north of this group, in Carrickard townland, stood the medieval church and graveyard of Kilmactranny.
The position of these monuments is especially significant. The Knockmore and Kilmactranny sites stood within easy walking distance of many of the settlements across the middle and western parts of what is now Tirerrill. For communities living around Lough Arrow, Kilmacallan, Kilmactranny and the adjoining Moytura country, this was not a remote religious outpost. It formed part of the ordinary local landscape through which people moved for worship, burial, exchange and contact with neighbouring settlements.
Modern barony, county and diocesan boundaries should not be projected too rigidly onto this earlier period. The sharply drawn lines visible on later maps did not yet exist in the same form. Political, kinship and ecclesiastical affiliations could overlap, while territorial control might change without completely altering the older pattern of movement and religious association. A community might acknowledge one ruling group, maintain ties with a church in another territory and share marriage, grazing or seasonal routes across what later became a formal border.
The southern Tirerrill and north Roscommon country should therefore be understood as a blurred frontier rather than as two neatly separated regions. The dedication of Tobercaleen to St Caillín places the religious memory of Fenagh within this overlapping landscape. It does not prove that Kilmactranny was formally part of Conmaicne Réin, but it shows that Caillín’s cult was known and honoured close to the settlements of central and western Tirerrill. The connection was practical as well as geographical. The Conmaicne religious world lay within the normal range of movement of the local population.
This is probably the most useful way to understand the wider Conmaicne connection. It need not mean that all of Tirerrill was originally Conmaicne or that every early family in the district belonged to one descent group. It means that the southern Tirerrill–Moytura landscape was geographically and culturally connected to a broad Conmaicne world extending from western Connacht toward the upper Shannon.
Movement through this country could follow a natural sequence: from the lower Moy and southern Sligo into the Lough Arrow basin, across the Moytura and Kilmactranny district toward Lough Key, and from there north-eastward toward Lough Allen, Fenagh and Conmaicne Réin. The route later became important to churchmen, dynasties and learned families, but its foundations lay in the physical geography of the region.
The later importance of Fenagh as a centre of Conmaicne tradition may preserve the memory of relationships extending farther west than its immediate territory. Medieval genealogies associated numerous families and communities with the Conmaicne and used descent to define tribute, status and religious obligation. Such material cannot simply be projected backward into the prehistoric period, but it may preserve older connections of movement, alliance and shared tradition.
From an older population to Tír nAilella
The emergence of Tír nAilella should therefore be seen as one political layer placed over a much older inhabited landscape. The Uí Ailella did not settle an empty country. They ruled a population whose ancestors had farmed the valleys, used the lakes and recognised the ancient monuments for generations.
Early Irish dynasties frequently gave their own ancestral names to territories containing other families. The appearance of a ruling pedigree does not prove that the complete population shared the same paternal descent. Beneath the royal Uí Ailella were likely numerous local kindreds, tenant communities, ritual families, craftsmen and minor nobles whose names were never preserved.
Some of these people may previously have been associated with the Conmaicne or with other early populations whose political identity later faded. Others may have entered the district through marriage, clientship or migration. As Uí Ailella power weakened in later centuries, the inhabitants did not vanish. They remained and were progressively absorbed into the political worlds of neighbouring Uí Fiachrach, Uí Briúin and Conmaicne-related territories.
This offers a better model for the early history of Tirerrill than a succession of complete population replacements. The region was characterised by continuity at the level of settlement and repeated change at the level of ruling identity. Families could remain close to the same lake or valley while their political classification changed around them.
The world Patrick entered
By the fifth century, the country around Lough Arrow, Moytura, Kilmacallan, Kilmactranny, Shancough and Tawnagh already contained the essential structure upon which the later Christian landscape would be built.
It had a settled agricultural population. It possessed recognised routes between western Connacht, Sligo, Moylurg and the upper Shannon. Its hills and lakes were associated with ancient monuments and inherited stories. Its communities lived under local rulers whose authority depended upon kinship, cattle, land and the control of strategic places. Its religious world included sacred locations whose importance long predated the church.
Later Patrician texts place Patrick in Tír nAilella and preserve traditions of foundations at Tamnach, commonly associated with Tawnagh, and Cell Senchuae, generally connected with Shancough. These accounts were written well after Patrick’s lifetime and cannot be read as straightforward fifth-century travel records. Their geographical detail is nevertheless important because it shows how later churchmen understood the region: as an established territory entered by recognised routes and containing communities capable of granting land and supporting churches.
The Christian founders did not create Tirerrill’s settlement pattern. They inserted churches into it. They required land from local authorities, labour from nearby households and continuing produce from an agricultural population. A successful church had to become part of the existing social order.
The later concentration of Patrick-associated names and churches around southern Tirerrill may therefore represent more than missionary commemoration. It may mark the Christian adaptation of an older religious zone. Places already associated with assembly, burial, territorial memory or inherited authority were natural locations around which a Christian presence could develop.
The deeper beginning of the Ó Maol Phádraig story
Only at this later point does Rathmulpatrick become relevant to the Ó Maol Phádraig investigation. It stands within a landscape already shaped by ancient monuments, settled farmsteads, routeways and later church sites. Its importance does not arise from proof that an Ó Maol Phádraig family lived there before Patrick. No such proof exists. The surname itself could only develop after devotion to Patrick had become established.
Its importance lies in the kind of landscape it occupied. This was a district in which sacred authority, landholding and community identity had already been closely connected for centuries. A family associated with the care of land, the service of a church or the memory of a saint could have developed from older local structures without preserving any written account of that transition.
The pre-Patrician history of Tirerrill therefore does not provide a named Ó Maol Phádraig ancestor. It reveals the human foundation from which such a family could later emerge.
The region already possessed settled households, inherited landholding and a strong connection between ancestry and place. It contained sacred locations whose custodianship may have passed through particular families. It stood between the Uí Ailella territory and a wider Conmaicne world extending through Moytura, north Roscommon, Leitrim and the upper Shannon. Its geography encouraged movement eastward toward Moylurg and Fenagh while allowing local families to retain deep western roots.
The later appearance of Ó Maol Phádraig beside Ó Maolmochéirghe in a Cenél Luacháin genealogy need not therefore prove that the family originated in northern Leitrim. It may reflect the eventual incorporation of a family with older western connections into a Conmaicne and Bréifne ecclesiastical order. Rathmulpatrick remains significant because it stands near the western end of that possible history, within a landscape where pre-Christian sacred authority, early settlement and later Patrician tradition overlap.
Before Patrick, Tirerrill was already old. Its people lived among the visible works of ancestors whose names had been forgotten. They farmed beneath cairned mountains, crossed valleys shaped by ice, travelled beside lakes and interpreted the ancient stones through stories of gods, giants and heroic peoples. The arrival of Christianity altered that world, but it did not erase it. The first churches inherited its routes, depended upon its settlements and occupied places whose authority had been forming for thousands of years.
That older landscape is the true beginning of the Tirerrill story and perhaps the necessary beginning of the Ó Maol Phádraig story as well.
References
Fitzpatrick, Ian, and Mike Fitzpatrick. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans, Part I.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 4 (2023): 1–10.
Fitzpatrick, Mike, and Proinsias Mag Fhionnghaile. “Ó Maol Phádraig: the Name, the People, and the Clans, Part II.” Journal of the Fitzpatrick Clan Society 5 (2024): 25–42.
Kelly, Eamonn P. “Mythology and Landscape of Sligo, Part 2: The Battle of Moytura and Formaoil na Fiann.” Sligo Field Club Journal 7 (2021): 149–164.
McLaughlin, Barney R. “County Sligo: Three Monasteries, Three Saints.”
Townlands.ie. “Barony of Tirerrill, County Sligo.”