50 Fun Facts About Counties of Ireland

Which Cork harbour town, then called Queenstown, was the Titanic's final port of call?

Cobh was known as Queenstown from 1849 until 1920, renamed during a visit by Queen Victoria. Of the 123 passengers who boarded the Titanic there, only 44 survived the sinking.

Which rocky island off Kerry, site of an early monastery, became Luke Skywalker's refuge in Star Wars?

Skellig Michael doubled as the planet Ahch-To in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. Monks founded its monastery between the 6th and 8th centuries, and UNESCO listed the island in 1996.

Which north-coast county contains the Giant's Causeway and its roughly 40,000 basalt columns?

Antrim's famous columns came from an ancient volcanic eruption, though legend says the giant Fionn mac Cumhaill built them as a path to fight a Scottish rival.

Which county on the border with Northern Ireland is the smallest on the island by area?

Louth is known as the Wee County, and well over half of its people live in just two towns, Dundalk and Drogheda.

Which county in the Republic of Ireland reaches further north than any part of Northern Ireland?

Donegal shares a small border with only one other county in the Republic, so the rest of its land boundary is with Northern Ireland.

Which county's beaches at Curracloe stood in for Omaha Beach in the film Saving Private Ryan?

Wexford also drew John F. Kennedy, who as US president visited his ancestral home at Dunganstown, near New Ross.

Which nickname is used for Kerry, the county with more All-Ireland football titles than any other?

The Kingdom goes back at least to 1787, when the MP John Philpot Curran told the Irish House of Commons that Kerry seemed not to be part of the same country.

Which castle in Cork holds a stone said to give the gift of the gab to those who kiss it?

Blarney Castle's stone is built into the battlements, so anyone who wants to kiss it has to lean over backwards on the edge of the parapet.

Which west-coast county is home to both the Cliffs of Moher and the limestone landscape of the Burren?

Clare's cliffs appeared as the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride and as the setting for a sea cave in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

How many traditional counties make up the island of Ireland, on both sides of the border?

32 is the traditional total: 26 counties are in the Republic of Ireland, and the other six make up Northern Ireland.

Which of Ireland's four provinces is split by the border, with six of its nine counties in Northern Ireland?

Ulster's other three counties are in the Republic of Ireland, so using the province's name for Northern Ireland leaves out a third of it.

Which Munster county shares its name with a five-line comic verse form popularised by Edward Lear?

Limerick is generally taken to be the source of the verse's name, although Edward Lear, who made the form famous, never used the word for it himself.

Which county contains Newgrange, a passage tomb older than both Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids?

Meath's great tomb was built around 3100 BC and aligned so that the rising sun on the winter solstice shines through a roofbox and floods the inner chamber.

Which western county contains Croagh Patrick, where Saint Patrick is said to have fasted for forty days?

Mayo's holy mountain is climbed by thousands of pilgrims every year on Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July, a custom that goes back to at least the Middle Ages.

Which north-western county is nicknamed Yeats Country and holds the grave of W. B. Yeats at Drumcliff?

Sligo received the poet's remains in 1948: he had died in France in 1939, and the Irish Naval Service brought him home to be reburied.

Which county, the largest in Ireland without a coastline, is home to the Rock of Cashel?

Tipperary borders eight other counties, more than any other, and the Rock of Cashel was the seat of the kings of Munster before the Norman invasion.

Which county, whose hurlers are nicknamed the Cats, has won the most All-Ireland senior hurling titles?

Kilkenny owes the nickname to the proverbial Kilkenny cats, famed as tenacious fighters, and it is also known as the Marble County.

Which county just south of Dublin, home to the valley of Glendalough, is called the Garden of Ireland?

Wicklow was the last of the traditional counties to be created, formed as late as 1606 from land that had belonged to its neighbours.

Which county, home to Ireland's largest Irish-speaking area, contains Connemara and the three Aran Islands?

Galway's Gaeltacht stretches west from the city through Connemara, and Irish is still the main language spoken on the Aran Islands.

At which Dublin stadium do county teams play the All-Ireland finals in Gaelic football and hurling?

Croke Park is the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which has staged its games there since 1891, and it holds more than 82,000 spectators.

Which county contains the Mourne Mountains and Slieve Donard, the highest peak in Northern Ireland?

Down is also where Saint Patrick is reputed to be buried, at Down Cathedral in the county town of Downpatrick.

Which county, the largest in Northern Ireland, takes its name from the Irish for 'land of Eoghan'?

Tyrone was the traditional stronghold of the O'Neills, the strongest of the Gaelic families in the north, whose rule there lasted into the seventeenth century.

Which county is home to the Curragh, the racecourse that stages all five Irish Classic flat races?

Kildare is nicknamed the Thoroughbred County, and also the Shortgrass County after the close-cropped grass of the Curragh commons.

Which county shares its name with Ireland's oldest city, founded by Vikings in 914 and famed for crystal?

Waterford still has Reginald's Tower, the oldest urban civic building in the country and the oldest monument to keep its Viking name.

Which midland county has Mullingar, the home town of One Direction singer Niall Horan, as its county town?

Westmeath was part of Meath until the reign of Henry VIII, when an act of the Irish Parliament split off the western half as a county of its own.

Which county contains the Shannon Pot, the pool on Cuilcagh Mountain where Ireland's longest river rises?

Cavan is known as the Lakeland County and is reputed to contain 365 lakes, one for every day of the year.

Which town, home of an August festival that crowns a 'Rose' each year, is the county town of Kerry?

Tralee's festival started in 1959 on a budget of £750 and takes its inspiration from a 19th-century ballad about a woman famed for her beauty.

Which county is said to owe its best-known nickname to its support for the pretender Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII?

The Rebel County is a name Cork is said to have earned in the 1490s by backing Warbeck's claim to the English throne, and its role in the War of Independence reinforced it.

Which trophy goes to the county that wins the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship in Gaelic football?

The Sam Maguire Cup honours an influential figure in London GAA, and the 1928 original was a faithful model of the Ardagh Chalice, an early Christian treasure.

Which Kerry mountain, the highest in Ireland, is most often climbed by a route called the Devil's Ladder?

Carrauntoohil's name means Tuathal's sickle, and a five-metre steel cross was put up on its summit in 1976, replacing an earlier wooden one.

Which county, the smallest in Northern Ireland, is known as the Orchard County for its many apple orchards?

Armagh's county town is the seat of two archbishops, one Catholic and one Church of Ireland, who each hold the title Primate of All Ireland.

Which county, almost a third of it covered by lakes and waterways, has Enniskillen as its county town?

Fermanagh's water is mostly Upper and Lower Lough Erne, and the county is by far the least populous of the six in Northern Ireland.

Which county is named after the only city in Ireland whose defensive walls are still completely intact?

Derry, officially County Londonderry, takes its name from the Irish for an oak grove, which is why it is nicknamed the Oak Leaf County.

Which county has the fewest people of any in Ireland and a coastline less than five kilometres long?

Leitrim reaches the sea only at Tullaghan, where a few kilometres of shore on Donegal Bay give it the shortest coastline of any county that touches the sea.

Which midland county is home to Birr Castle, whose telescope was the world's largest from 1845 to 1917?

Offaly's Leviathan of Parsonstown, a reflecting telescope with a 72-inch mirror, held its record until the Hooker Telescope was built in California.

Which county was the birthplace of Douglas Hyde, the Gaelic scholar who became Ireland's first president?

Roscommon also holds Rathcroghan, the legendary home of Queen Medb and the ancient seat of the kings of Connacht.

Which 2,500 km coastal driving route runs through nine counties from the Inishowen Peninsula to Kinsale?

The Wild Atlantic Way was officially launched in 2014 and crosses three provinces on its way from the far north to the Celtic Sea coast.

Which lake, the largest in the British Isles, has shores in five of Northern Ireland's six counties?

Lough Neagh has supported eel fishing for centuries: the eels swim some 4,000 miles from the Sargasso Sea to reach it, and they now have protected status under EU law.

Dublin's county council was replaced in 1994 by South Dublin, Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown and which third county?

Fingal takes its name from the Irish for 'foreign tribe', a reminder of the Scandinavian settlers whose medieval territory lay in the area.

Which Kerry peninsula ends at Dunmore Head, the most westerly point of the Irish mainland?

Dingle reaches so far west that the village of Dún Chaoin, near its tip, is jokingly described as the nearest parish to America.

Which county, the second-smallest in Ireland, holds the Brownshill Dolmen and its enormous capstone?

Carlow is nicknamed the Dolmen County after the 6,000-year-old portal tomb, whose capstone is reputed to be the heaviest in Europe.

Which midland county is the only one in Ireland that borders no county with a coastline?

Laois is ringed entirely by other inland counties, and its Rock of Dunamase was part of the dowry when the Irish princess Aoife married the Norman warrior Strongbow in 1170.

Which Leinster county's bog preserved the Corlea Trackway, an Iron Age road of oak planks laid in 148 BC?

Longford's buried road was built in 148–147 BC, which makes it a contemporary of the Roman siege of Carthage.

Which border county was the birthplace of Patrick Kavanagh, the poet of On Raglan Road and The Great Hunger?

Monaghan's village of Inniskeen is where Kavanagh was born in 1904, the fourth of ten children, and he based much of his work on the county.

Queen's County, a midland county created in 1556 and renamed after independence, was named for which queen?

Mary I had a matching county next door: King's County honoured her husband, Philip II of Spain, who was then King of Ireland by marriage.

What name is given to the smallest geographical division used in Ireland, of which there are over 60,000?

Townland boundaries are of medieval Gaelic origin, older than the Norman invasion, and the Placenames Database of Ireland recognised 61,098 of them in 2014.

Which medieval zone of English rule around Dublin covered most of four counties, the obedient shires?

The Pale takes its name from the Latin palus, a stake used to support a fence, and it stretched north from Dalkey to Dundalk.

Which sea inlet on the east coast separates the Republic's smallest county from Northern Ireland?

Carlingford Lough has a Viking name, from the Old Norse for the narrow sea-inlet of the hag, and geologists class it as a glacial fjord.

Which lighthouse islet off the Cork coast, Ireland's most southerly point, is known as Ireland's Teardrop?

Fastnet Rock earned the name because it was the last part of Ireland that many 19th-century emigrants saw as they sailed for North America.

Which headland on the Inishowen Peninsula is the most northerly point of mainland Ireland?

Malin Head has a weather station whose reports are broadcast as part of the BBC Shipping Forecast.