The Present Hurling Region

Present Hurling Region

A map of Ireland showing the present hurling regions. The hurling heartland covers Cork, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Limerick, Clare, Galway, Offaly, Laois, Waterford and Wexford. The present northern regions are represented by the Glens of Antrim and the Ards Peninsula, County Down.

Permission from Dr Kevin Whelan

Present Hurling Region
Permission from Dr Kevin Whelan

Present Hurling Region

A map of Ireland showing the present hurling regions. The hurling heartland covers Cork, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Limerick, Clare, Galway, Offaly, Laois, Waterford and Wexford. The present northern regions are represented by the Glens of Antrim and the Ards Peninsula, County Down.

Permission from Dr Kevin Whelan

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If one looks at the present hurling core region, it is remarkably compact. It also exhibits striking continuity with the earlier 'ioman' region. The hurling heartland is focused on the three counties of Cork, Tipperary and Kilkenny, with a supporting cast of adjacent counties including Limerick, Clare, Galway, Offaly, Laois, Waterford and Wexford. In the hurling core, the game is king, and very closely stitched into the fabric of the community. Describing the situation in Rathnure, Billy Rackard claimed that in the absence of hurling, 'the parish would commit suicide, if a parish could commit suicide!' The boundaries of the hurling region are surprisingly well-defined. To the north, the midland bogs act, as in a way they done throughout history, as a buffer zone, resolutely impervious to the spread of cultural influences from further south. The western edge of the hurling zone can be traced over a long distance. In County Galway, for example, its boundaries run along a line from Ballinasloe to the city; north of this line is the Tuam Dunmore area, and west of it is Connemara, both footballing territories. In County Clare, the boundary runs from Tubber on the Galway border through Corofin and Kilmaley to Labasheeda on the Shannon estuary. The tremendous achievement of Clare in winning a Munster football championship was most thoroughly relished in the footballing bastion of west Clare, from Kilkee and Doonbeg to Milltown Malbay. One could easily establish this pattern by looking at the thickening density of the forest of flags as on drove from east to west in August of 1992. Across the Shannon in Limerick, the football-hurling divide runs clearly along the scarp dividing hilly west Limerick from the lush limestone lowlands of east Limerick. West of this is an enclave of hurling parishes in the footballing kingdom of Kerry in the area north of Tralee, in Ardfert, Ballyheigue, Causeway and Ballyduff. From Limerick, the hurling boundary loops through County Cork from Mallow to the city and then to the coast at Cloyne home to the maestro Christy Ring, who famously expressed his strategy for promoting the game in Cork by stabbing a knife through every football found east of that line.

Outside this core region, there are only the hurling enclaves in the Glens of Antrim and on the tip of the Ards peninsula, where the clubs of Ballycran, Ballygalget and Portaferry backbone Down's hurling revival.

The interesting question then is how these boundaries formed. In almost every case, that boundary divides big farm and small farm areas and marks the transition from fertile, drift-covered limestone lowland to hillier, hungrier, wetter shales, flagstones, grits and granites. In County Galway, for example, hurling has not put down roots in the bony granite outcrops of Connemara, and in Clare the poorly drained flagstone deposits are equally inhospitable. If ash is emblematic of hurling areas, the rush is the distinctive symbol of football territory.

This brief case study illustrates the interplay of what the French call la longue duree, the long evolution of history and les evenements the specific, precise incidents and personalities which intervene and alter that evolution. Hurling offers a classic Irish example, and the current game demonstrates that, beneath the superficial breaks, fractures and discontinuities, there are sometimes surprisingly stable, deep structures. If the idiom of the game changed, its grammar stays the same.

Text by kind permission of Dr. Kevin Whelan.