The history of Portumna
Clanricarde's house, the fire, the workhouse, the Land War, the swing bridge, the forest park. 12 moments, in order.
- Before 1618
Clanricarde's house
Richard Burke, fourth Earl of Clanricarde, built Portumna Castle before 1618: a semi-fortified house rather than a keep, and the main seat of the de Burgos for more than two hundred years.
- 15th century
The abbey in the woods
The Cistercian abbey whose remains stand in the forest park dates from the fifteenth century.
- 1826
The fire
The castle was gutted by fire in 1826. One story says the Earl's wolfhound died on the balcony beside his daughter; another, doubted, that a hound called Fury once broke a child's fall from an upper window, and bones dug up in the grounds are shown inside as his.
- 1850
The workhouse
The Portumna Poor Law Union was declared on 22 February 1850 for 121 square miles, and George Wilkinson's workhouse for 600 people went up half a mile north-east of the town for £6,700. Since 2011 the Irish Workhouse Centre there has been the only place in Ireland that tells the workhouses' history.
- 1886
The Land War begins
The Land League's plan of campaign against rents started in Portumna, aimed at Hubert de Burgh-Canning, Marquess of Clanricarde, for his treatment of tenants. On rent day in November 1886 four thousand tenants marched with a brass band past the estate office to the hotel, where nationalist MPs set the rent they would offer; the agent refused it, and the money went to the tenants' defence. The Perpetual Crimes Act of 1887, the last Irish crimes act on the British statute book, followed the disturbances here.
- 1911
The bridge
C. E. Stanier's five-span steel bridge over the Shannon opened in 1911, resting on Hayes's Island between the two channels, with a pivoting swing section over the navigation channel: the largest early-twentieth-century swing bridge in Europe. The opening section was renewed in October 2008.
- 1913
The golf club
Portumna Golf Club was founded in 1913; its eighteen-hole parkland course inside the forest park was ranked 53rd in Ireland in 2014.
- 1948
The forest park
The state bought almost 600 hectares of the Clanricarde lands on the northern shore of Lough Derg in 1948; Coillte's forest park has lakeside walks, cycle trails, the abbey ruins, a marina and islands offshore.
- 1985
Port-mud-na
In August 1985 the three Irish scout associations held their first joint jamboree here for International Youth Year; the mud gave it a name everyone still uses.
- 2006 to 2014
Four All-Irelands
Portumna's hurlers won the All-Ireland senior club championship in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2014, and six Galway titles; Joe Canning is one of theirs.
- 2010
The forest marathon
The Portumna Forest Marathon began in 2010 with a full and half marathon and 50 km and 100 km ultras; it staged a World Cup trophy race in 2014.
- 2022
1,690 people
The market town on the Tipperary border counted 1,690 at the 2022 census.
Where this comes from
Every paragraph above summarises a statement in Wikipedia, "Portumna", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, as it read on 2026-09-19. Follow it for the footnotes. Nothing has been added from memory.