The Wild Atlantic Way and Western Ireland. Tom Cooper

      Ross Errilly Friary has a well-preserved cloister (Route 3, Stage 8)

      From the late eighth century onwards Irish settlements and monasteries became targets of Viking coastal raiders. The Vikings established permanent bases in Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick which went on to become the first significant towns in Ireland.

      Politically, Ireland had been ruled, since prehistoric times, as a series of regional kingdoms with, occasionally, one king emerging as more powerful than his rivals and claiming suzerainty. Ireland’s first High King, Brian Boru, was crowned in 1002. He is credited with bringing stability to the island, supressing the Viking threat and restoring some of the damage inflicted on the monasteries during the preceding century.

      English invasion and religious division

      The Anglo Norman invasion of 1169 began a process of the slow seizure of power from the traditional Gaelic rulers of Ireland. But the Gaelic political and social order that had flourished since prehistoric times persisted into the 17th century in much of Ireland.

      English interest in Ireland waxed and waned periodically after the initial invasion, before reawakening in earnest during the 16th century. The first of the British rulers to claim the title of King of Ireland was King Henry VIII of England in 1541. Much of the conflict in Britain and Europe over the following two centuries stemmed from Henry’s decision to split the church in England away from the Catholic church, alongside the wider ructions of the Reformation. It became Ireland’s destiny to be proxy battleground for wider disputes between England and other European powers.

      In 1594 a full-on Irish rebellion against English rule broke out. What is now called the Nine Years’ War ended in 1603 following the defeat of the Irish, and an invading Spanish force, by the English at Kinsale. In 1607 the Ulster chieftains sailed out of Lough Swilly on the Donegal coast and into exile in France. This ‘Flight of the Earls’ marks the end of the power of the traditional Irish dynasties on the island.

      English-backed Protestant settlement of Ireland soon began in earnest. This, together with authoritarian attempts to impose the Reformation, set in place a religious divide that grew wider with the enacting of laws that discriminated against Catholics – who tended to be native Irish – and cemented the power of a ruling Protestant gentry. A period of open warfare, and a brief flowering of Catholic power, came to a brutal end in 1649 at the hand of England’s Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. More than a quarter of the island was then handed to Cromwell’s followers. The century ended in more tumult as the conflict between the deposed Catholic King of England James II and his Protestant successor William of Orange was fought out in Ireland. James was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 foreshadowing another century of oppression of Catholics.

      The United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798 – inspired by revolutions in North America and France – tried to unite Catholics and Protestants behind the cause of Irish freedom. But it prompted a backlash from Britain, not least because it was supported by a small-scale French invasion of Ireland. In the aftermath, the Irish Parliament was dissolved and Ireland was absorbed into the new Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, governed from Westminster.

      During the 19th century, the tide began to turn against anti-Catholic oppression. Daniel ‘the Liberator’ O’Connell was elected to the Westminster parliament in 1828 as the member for County Clare but, initially, the Catholic Kerry-born barrister was not allowed to take his seat. The law was changed, not least because of fears of a Catholic uprising, and O’Connell took his place in parliament in 1830.