Prehistory and the Middle Ages

The Shannon has played a significant role in the history of Ireland down the ages and was an important line of communication from prehistoric times to the Middle Ages, when travel by road was very difficult. It also provided access into the heart of the country for the Viking invaders.

Prehistoric Times
Few prehistoric settlements have come to light on Shannon's shores, but when the river and its tributaries (particularly the Suck) were being drained in the middle of the last century, many bronze implements and weapons were dredged up from their beds. While this might conjure up a picture of early population groups fighting one another for control of the waterways, in fact these Bronze Age (second and first millennium BC) objects are perhaps better interpreted as being among the many items deposited in Europe's moors and inland waters as ritual offerings to appease some river or other god or goddess.

The lands surrounding the lower Shannon in counties Clare, Limerick and Tipperary are particularly rich in late Bronze Age ornaments, including the famous gorgets, and they bear testimony to a richness in prehistoric craftsmanship in the area around 700 BC. It has even been suggested that foreign craftsmen may have settled in the region to work the considerable amounts of gold which seem to have been available at the time from some source now sadly unknown to us.

The Monastic Period
But it is with the dawning of the historic period from the fifth century AD onwards that the Shannon really begins to glisten in another Golden Age—that of the early Christian monasteries which have made Ireland famous. Prime among these was Clonmacnois, the Shannon’s greatest gem. This venerable site, which attracts the visitor back again and again like a magnet, started its long recorded history when St Ciaran founded his monastery there around AD 545—only to die some months later, like his Lord and Master, at the age of 33. His choice of location was scarcely accidental for, unlike today, Clonmacnois was at the very crossroads of Ireland, where the Shannon—the country’s main north-south traffic artery—was crossed by ‘the great road’ along the Eiscir Riada, Ireland’s most important east-west thoroughfare in early historic times, though we can no longer pinpoint precisely where the river was forded.

But St Ciaran may not have been the first to recognise the significance of the spot as an important junction. The Irish life of the saint tells us that he got some Gaulish wine from Frankish merchants at Clonmacnois: the Irish have long appreciated a good drop of claret! These men would scarcely have come up the Shannon offering their wares had not some earlier traderoute existed to guide them on their way. In this respect, it is significant that a magnificent gold neck-ring of about 300 BC, found many years ago at Clonmacnois, turns out to have come from eastern Gaul or the Middle Rhine — possibly brought there to be deposited as an offering to a river god, like the prehistoric bronzes.

But if Clonmacnois may have been an important centre of some sort before it ever, became a monastery, it became even more so after the death of its monastic founder. From the seventh to the nineteenth century, it was one of Ireland’s most important centres of pilgrimage — an aspect of its activity often forgotten when compared to its monastic or artistic brilliance.

Another Shannon site famed for pilgrimage was Holy Island, or lnishcealtra, on Lough Derg. Like Clonmacnois, it has its Romanesque church and its round tower, both perhaps symbols of its pilgrimage trade. Like Clonmacnois, too, it had its collection of crosses and stone slabs, and they all combine to make these two ancient monasteries the most interesting of all historical sites to visit along the river’s course.

Before he founded his monastery of Clonmacnois, St Ciaran lived as a hermit on Hare Island in Lough Ree. Islands were favoured by early hermits as places where they could retreat from the cares of the world and concentrate on communicating with their Maker. Other islands in Lough Ree and Lough Key may also have been occupied by early hermits, around whose saintly graves small monastic communities may have grown up, later to build some of the pre-Norman churches which we find on some of the islands to this day.

The Vikings
The Vikings, who penetrated up the Shannon, cannot have made life any easier for these religious communities. The Vikings, whose superior boat design had enabled them to cross the North Sea from Norway, started to make raids on the east coast of Ireland late in the eighth century. But even before they began to settle permanently at places like Dublin (c. 841), they devastated some of the monasteries close to the banks of the Shannon, such as Clonfert and Clonmacnois, reaching as far north as the islands of Lough Ree. We have yet to identify any bases they may have used for these free-booting expeditions, so they may well have sailed and rowed their boats upstream from Limerick, as their Russian counterparts had done from the Baltic, and they doubtless used the downstream flow of the river to make a quick getaway before the Irish could make a counter-attack. While fear must have entered every native heart at their very appearance, the Irish were even more horrified at one strange lady in their entourage who had the cheek to profane the high altar at Clonmacnois by dispensing oracles from it!

The Normans
But more lasting were the effects created by those other descendants of the Norse Vikings, namely the Normans, who came to the Shannon at the time of their conquest of Ireland in the decades after their first arrival in 1169. From their bases east of the river, they crossed the Shannon and established bridgeheads on the other side in their campaign to conquer the western province of Connacht in 1235. One of these bridgeheads was Athlone, where stout remnants of the thirteenth-century Norman castle still survive by the quayside. It may have been the establishment of this castle c.1210 which caused the gradual decline in the use of the ford at Clonmacnois (where the Normans also built a castle), and set the seal on making Athlone the main crossing point along the middle reaches of the river, which it has remained to this day. There is, however, one other less well-known Norman fortification of importance on the western bank of the river, which makes for a fascinating voyage of exploration and discovery. This is Rindoon on Lough Ree, where the Normans literally dug themselves in on a promontory site, which they defended by cutting a water-course across the end of the peninsula to make it into an island.