Dysert O’Dea or the home of the Neylans

 It is one of the sites on our Heritage Pass, though not one requiring an entrance fee. First of all Gloria (our Nat Sav) thought it would take 17 km to get there but we knew it was just 3. Yes it was such a gem, that all of the world had conspired to make it hard for people to find it.

Down a few one lane roads, inevitable high green hedges on each side of the road hid any possible clues. ‘I see a castle’ says K, and this is a common occurrence so far, usually stated as ‘another random castle on the left, or right’. But we were looking for a castle. Because K’s Neylan family lived in the Corofin district.

We pulled into a parking bay like widening of the road where a gate which was locked seemed to beckon. ‘Here says N, it is a stile’, meaning stones sticking out of the stone wall on either side of a gap in the said stone wall. We were on private land, make no mistake. 

The grass was very thick, dotted with fat sheep and lambs, and those sheep were shedding. One large female seemed to approach us with malice, like the head sheep in Burra whose name I forget. But there was one in Babe too, remember the pig story - “something, Ram, ewe, something , Ram, Ewe” to your flock, your clan be true”.

Admittedly this mother sheep was rather contented looking, but if we’d come closer!

 Beyond that sheep-threatening field was a ruined monastic church, not the castle which we’d saved till later. Like a magnet drawing us forward, we entered the cemetery. And what did we see ‘straight away’. A Neylan headstone, and then another, and it was a cry that rang out time and time again. I guess about eight or nine times.

A Nest of Neylands, and though K says it’s a name like many others, everywhere in Ireland, well I had never seen it on the top 100 names of anywhere. Here was a concentration, a nest. They did not make it into the ruined church, or the east end reserved for the local Lord, whose old house we had also passed on the way in, but they were here non-the-less.