Monday 3 July 2017

Granuaille


While in County Mayo I took a snap of a tower on Achill Island. 



It apparently was one of Ghrianne's defence towers, Ghrianne was also known as Granuaille (Anglicised), or Grace O'Malley - the Pirate Queen of Mayo. 

On our final day in Mayo I spotted a biography of her in a Westport bookshop. She was the daughter of a local, 16th C. chieftain and rose to become a chieftain in her own right, based in Murrisk, and a woman making her own way in a very male dominated society.

She led an extremely interesting life that's well worth reading about.


6 comments:

A Heron's View said...

Sorry for nit picking! You have wrongly spelt this woman's name which is G[h]ráinne or even Gráinne
The h is inserted not for the spelling but only for the sound in pronuciation and then you have also omitted the accent over the letter a and needs to be as á this is obtained by pressing alt simultaneously as the letter on keyboard. What it does is to extend the pronunciation of the vowel in this case to a long soft aa.

Chairman Bill said...

The ai ia was a typo, but I'm loathe to put accents in Blogger due to the way it treats some characters. I have yet to find a way of inserting an ampersand into a blog text, as it interprets it as something strange. Not sure how it's interpreted within the replies section, so I'll try it here --- & ---

Chairman Bill said...

So & works in the replies...

A Heron's View said...

Gráinne visit Elizabeth 1st to make her complaint.

Chairman Bill said...

That's taking it a bit over the top - it was only a typo...

A Heron's View said...

Yes, perhaps but I wrote when intoxicated -ok