Goodly Barrow: A voyage on an Irish river

This is the story of a river and of the countryside through which it flows. The Barrow valley, traversing south Leinster from the Slieve Bloom mountains to Waterford harbour, is a little-known part of Ireland, yet one of hte most interesting. A string of warring tribal kingdoms in Celtic times, it became a great medieval highway and a frontier of the English pale. Viking and Norman found their way up the estuary; castles, abbeys and towns rose along the banks, and the fertile plans of Kildare and Carlow attracted Tudor and Cromwellian adventurers. Edmund Spenser called this river "the goodly Barrow which doth hoord great heapes of salmons in his deepe bosome". Tadhg O'Sullivan's book presents the river in its many different aspects: tribal deity and life-symbol, frontier and battleground, highway and navigation; but above all in its relationship to the people who dwell on its banks and those whom the current of history has brought here in the past - gaelic chieftain, Norman war-lord, Cistercian monk, Quaker settler, Huguenot refugee. The small riverside towns in their somnolent decay, the ancient and beatiful bridges guarded by crumbling castles, the toppled stones of once-great abbeys, all have their legengs and songs. Goodley Barrow is a rambling book in a particular Irish traditional. It is no guidebook, but a narrative that drifts with the river's flow, wandering as often as not down sidestreams of literature, anecdote or pure fancy; never loath to indulge the author's personal foibles. But beneath the placid surface there is a deeper purpose: to focus attention on this little-known but highly0civilised part of Ireland and on the priceless heritage which we possess in the simply things of our countryside.