Sliabh Luachra

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Sliabh Luachra (pronounced Shleeve Lew-cra) is a region in Munster, Ireland, located around the River Blackwater, on the County Cork/County Kerry borderland. This region has a unique musical style which makes heavy use of the polka and the slide. Indeed, most of the polkas and slides in Irish traditional music derive from this region. Musicians from the area include Denis Murphy, Julia Clifford, Padraig O'Keeffe, Johnny O'Leary, and Jackie Daly.

Opinions differ as to the exact location and extent of Sliabh Luachra, but it is generally accepted to refer to the mountainous rush-filled upland that straddles the border area of Cork, Kerry, and Limerick, including the Kerry parishes of Cordal, Brosna and Gneeveguilla, the town of Rathmore and the Cork town of Ballydesmond.

The name Sliabh Luachra means “a mountain of rushes”. However it is not a singular mountain, but a rolling plateau interspersed with what is generally accepted as its seven glens, or ‘seacht ngleann Sleibhe Luachra’, over which various mountain peaks reach heights from approximately 450 to 500 metres.

Sliabh Luachra was inhabited for centuries before the Egyptian geographer, Claudius Ptolemy, drew the first map of Ireland in the second century A.D.

The Sliabh Luachra mountains are said to have prevented Saint Patrick from entering Kerry.