Boreen na mBan gorm and the 40 Steps

Take a boat from Dunmore and head up the estuary towards Creadon Head. At the bottom of Creadon Head there were steps hewn into the rock, that led up the cliff to the fields above, where they joined a boreen that led across the country to the west coast..

The story was that this was called "Boreen na mBan gorm", or "Road of the Blue Women" in Irish.

This was because in Irish a black man should have been called a 'fear dubh', meaning literally a black man, but in Irish "An Fear Dubh" meant "The Devil", so they used the nearest colour, "gorm", meaning blue, to describe a black person. Bothar na Mna Gorm was the road of the black women, used to transport slaves from Europe to America.

21-08-06

Well, I can confirm that the steps are still there, or most of them anyway. I was there two days ago and walked down the steps to the sea.

It was quite a walk out on Creadon Head before I got to the end, followed by a trek down through some heavy undergrowth, but then there they were, just as I had remembered.

Click here for photos of the event!

As for the story, who knows? Apparently Raymond McGrath did a lot of research on this and traced the boreen to Glanmire in Cork.