History
County Waterford is colloquially known as "The Déise" (An Déise). Some time between the 4th and 8th centuries, a tribe of native Gaelic people called the Déisi were driven from southern county Meath/north Kildare, conquering and settling here. The ancient principality of the Déise is today roughly coterminous with the current Roman Catholic Diocese of Waterford and Lismore. The westernmost of the baronies are "Decies within Drum" and "Decies without Drum", separated by the Drum-Fineen hills. There are many megalithic tombs and ogham stones in the county. The Viking influence can still be seen with Reginald's Tower, one of the first buildings to use a bricks and mortar construction method in Ireland. Woodstown, a settlement dating to the 9th Century was discovered 5.5 kilometres west of Waterford city. It was the largest settlement outside of Scandinavia and the only large-scale 9th Century Viking settlement discovered to date in Western Europe. Other architectural features are products of the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland and its effects.
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“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)