Mountshannon

Mountshannon (Irish: Baile Uí Bheoláin, meaning "townland of Ó Beoláin", historically anglicised as Ballybolan) is a village in east County Clare, Ireland. The village is on the western shore of Lough Derg, north of Killaloe. The village was designed and built from scratch by Alexander Woods, a Limerick merchant, who intended it as a purely Protestant settlement from which the surrounding Catholic population would be so impressed by the thrift and industry of the settlers that they would quickly convert to the Reformed Church; even as late as the 1830s there was not a single Catholic resident in the village. In fact the reverse happened - it was the Catholics who colonised the village, and the picturesque Protestant church in a wooded...