Gallivanter Ireland

A chairde,

Gallivanter is a work in progress. This is the first version and as such there are likely to be many errors. Please be patient with us as we try to iron out any bugs early on. We are also working on adding the remainder of the icons for the north of the country but the data is more fragmented and harder to obtain.

The point of Gallivanter is to preserve and display knowledge that is at risk of being lost.
With your help we want to collect and save the names / stories associated with the locations on this map. If you dont know the names or stories of any monuments it is likely that there is still somebody in the locality who does.

For example in my area of rural county Galway, an elderly farmer who lived close to 2 iron age forts was able to tell me their names Parkalissa and Crushira, this man was not a native Irish speaker and the last native Irish speakers in that area would have died in the 1930s, but the fact he knew the sites only by their Irish names proves that there was hundreds of years of history behind them.

These names had never been written down anywhere before I uploaded them to the app.
Get out and ask around or ask the farmers who own the fields on which the sites are located. Once these elderly people pass away, the information is lost forever. So its urgent that the info is preserved.

Also, although many sites have been preserved amazingly for thousands of years, many other sites have been spoiled by amateur archaeologists or farming practices. Some of these locations may be recorded on the map and no visible trace of the monument now remains.


The secondary aim of Gallivanter is to support Irish local adventure activity businesses. To highlight their services, and make them more visible to both Irish people and tourists and to encourage more people to avail of the services provided by these small scale businesses.


Warning
Although the monuments themselves are the property of the State and as such can be passively enjoyed by the people, the land surrounding monuments is most often privately owned, so you are encouraged to ask the landowners permission before setting foot on his/her land.

Because most sites have not been archaeologically excavated, interfering with monuments is highly illegal and will incur fines of hundreds of thousands of euro. Please be respectful of the fact that for thousands of years local people, for spiritual or whatever other reasons, have been careful not to interfere with their local monuments, you would do well to do the same.