Limerick

Limerick spreads from King's Island in the Shannon estuary, where Norse raiders first came in 812 and later settled; in the Middle Ages it was a city at the centre of the Gaelic kingdom of Thomond, the land of the O'Briens. King John's Castle, begun in the early thirteenth century, guarded the English Town on the island, while the Irish Town grew along the older streets on the south bank. Saint Mary's Cathedral dates from 1168.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Limerick became a fortress in Ireland's wars. A judge who lived there wrote in 1620 that its lofty buildings of marble reminded him of the colleges of Oxford. Cromwell's army besieged the city in 1651, and the Williamites besieged it twice in the 1690s; the Treaty of Limerick, which ended the Williamite war between the Catholic James II and William of Orange, offered toleration to Catholics who swore loyalty to William and Mary, and its terms were later set aside. When peace returned in the later eighteenth century, the port prospered by shipping the produce of the Golden Vale to Britain and America, and the merchants built the gridded Georgian district of Newtown Pery south of the old town.