Tirawley is the north-western barony of Co. Mayo. For roughly four hundred years it was O’Dubhda land, part of the kingdom of Uí Fiachrach Muaidhe. In the thirteenth century the Welsh family of Barrett displaced the O’Dubhda there; by the late fifteenth century the Barretts in turn had been displaced by the Burkes. The folk-story below is how Tirawley remembers that second handover — through a sequence of injuries and acts of revenge, anchored at four specific places that still carry its names.

The story is preserved by Dubhaltach Mac Firbis, the seventeenth-century O’Dubhda hereditary historian, in The Book of the Genealogies of Ireland — our earliest written source. Gertrude O’Reilly Mac Hale retold it at length in Stories from O’Dowda’s Country (1971) and the expanded 2018 edition; what follows here mostly follows her telling, with the verse and the closing line restored from Mac Firbis.

I.  The core story

The steward. When the Barretts were at the height of their power, they sent a steward — a man named Sgornach, said by the tradition to be a libertine — to extract rents from the Lynotts, a Welsh family who had come over with the Red Earl Burke and settled around Moygownagh in Tirawley. The Lynotts killed Sgornach and threw his body into a well.

The well. The well was at Garranard, in the parish of Moygownagh, and afterwards it dried up. The dry well can still be pointed out. When the Barretts learned of the killing, they raised an armed force, marched on the Lynotts, and subdued them.

The blinding at Clochan na nDall. The Lynotts were offered a choice of punishment in the manner of the time: their men would be either blinded or emasculated. After consulting with their elders, the Lynotts chose blindness — because, they said, blind men could still propagate their species, and emasculated men could not. The Barretts then thrust needles into the eyes of the Lynott men. Each blinded man was compelled to cross the stepping-stones of the river by the castle of Carns, near Moygownagh. If he crossed without stumbling, any remaining sight was held to have betrayed him, and he was taken back and re-blinded. The place is still called Clochan na nDall, the stepping-stones of the blind men.

The foster-son. The Lynotts did not accept annihilation. They allied with the Burkes, then the rising power south of Nephin in the Castlebar country. Following an old Irish custom, they offered a fostering: a spirited horse was brought, and whichever son of the Burkes could break it would be adopted by the Lynotts. The son who broke the horse was Tibbot the Bald — Tiobot Maol Burke. He became the Lynotts’ foster-son.

The murder at Cornasack. The Barretts waylaid Tibbot Burke and murdered him at a small brook called Cornasack in Tirawley. The killing is remembered in the traditional verse below.

Tángadar Bairéadaigh na tíre,
Rinneadar gníomh nach raibh ceart,
Dhoirteadar fuil do b’uaisle ná an fíon,
Ag feadán caol Chuirr na Sac.

The Barretts of the country came,
They perpetrated a deed which was not just,
They shed blood which was nobler than wine,
At the narrow brook of Cornasack.

Forty-eight quarters. The Burkes were by now the stronger house. They forced the Barretts to settle the killing by paying an eric or blood-fine for their murdered son, fixed at forty-eight quarters of land — over five thousand acres. Crucially, Lynott himself, the foster-father, was to choose the land. He chose it not for its value but for its placement: tracts so laid out that the Barretts would be surrounded by the Burkes on every side. One of the tracts he chose was Belleek Castle with its eight quarters — about a thousand acres — and that is how the Burkes came to own Belleek.

II.  Mac Firbis’s closing line

Mac Firbis ends the story with a single sentence that sums up Tirawley’s seventeenth century in the voice of a man living through its final turn:

“… at length the Saxon heretics of Oliver Cromwell took it from them all in the year of Our Lord 1652; so that there is neither Barrett, nor Burke, nor O’Dubhda now in possession of the lands in Tirawley.”

— Dubhaltach Mac Firbis, quoted in O’Reilly 1971 / 2018, Ch 6.

The sequence as Mac Firbis tells it is a chain of dispossessions: the Welsh Barretts took Tirawley from the O’Dubhda; the Lynotts engineered Barrett loss to Burke; Cromwell’s Cromwellian settlement in 1652 took Tirawley from all of them. By the time the verse was being sung in the seventeenth century, none of the three houses still held it. The folk-tale is not a story of any one clan’s triumph. It is an account of how land keeps slipping.

III.  Four places in the landscape

Unusually for a folk-story, this one can be walked. Four named places in Moygownagh and Tirawley still carry the tradition:

• The dried-up well at Garranard (parish of Moygownagh) — where the Lynotts threw Sgornach’s body.
• Clochan na nDall, “the stepping-stones of the blind men” — on the river near Carns castle, Moygownagh, where the Barretts tested the blinded Lynott men.
• Cornasack brook in Tirawley — where Tibbot the Bald was killed by the Barretts.
• Belleek Castle itself — the eight-quarter tract Lynott chose as part of the Burkes’ blood-fine.

The places are close together: within an afternoon’s drive. The story is a local one in the strictest sense — its geography is compact, its anchors are findable, its four places still bear the names that mark what is said to have happened there. That closeness is probably why the story survived; every next generation grew up inside its map.

IV.  Provenance and variants

Mac Firbis the carrier. The tale has no Schools’ Collection life comparable to the Mermaid Rocks. We have not found a 1937–1939 entry that gives the full chain; most local collection entries on Moygownagh and Tirawley mention one anchor at a time (a well, a stepping-stone, a brook) without the threading narrative. The threaded version — the one with the causal chain from steward to Cromwellian dispossession — appears to survive principally through Mac Firbis’s Great Book of Genealogies, via O’Reilly’s retelling.

If you know a Schools’ Collection version that preserves more of the chain than the place-names alone, or a family version told differently — cloth of colour, number of blinded men, a woman named in the Lynotts — please get in touch.

V.  Sources and attestations

• Dubhaltach Mac Firbis, The Great Book of Irish Genealogies (mid-17th c., published in modern edition as Leabhar Mor na nGenealach, ed. Nollaig Ó Muraile, 2003) — the earliest and load-bearing source. Mac Firbis was the last hereditary historian of the O’Dubhda.
• Gertrude O’Reilly Mac Hale, O’Dowda Country Stories (IHR Publications, 2018), Ch 6 “Beleek Castle,” pp. 35–39 (with earlier version in Stories from O’Dowda’s Country, 1971) — fullest modern narrative retelling; preserves the Irish verse.
• Conor Mac Hale, The O’Dubhda Family History (1990) and Tour Guide to the Barony of Tireragh (1994) — place-name apparatus and topography.
• Logainm.ie — for the surviving Irish forms of Garranard, Moygownagh, and Cornasack.