Dunmore East is a small fishing village on the south-east coast of Ireland, 16kms from the city of Waterford. It sits on the western side of the Waterford Harbour Estuary, 4.8kms from Hook Head in Wexford.

Dunmore East, Co. Waterford, Ireland

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Stories

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.

As for the story, who knows? Apparently Raymond McGrath did a lot of research on this and

traced the boreen to Glanmire in Cork.

Boreen na mBan Gorm and the Forty Steps

And here they are, going all the way down to the sea!

There are some missing, where the rock has fallen away, but most have survived

I had to force my way through this undergrowth