A monastery was founded at Birr by St Brendan of Birr.
It produced the Gospels of McRegol, named after the abbot at the turn of the
8th/9th century and now to be seen in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The Synod of Birr, held in 697, was the occasion on which the Cáin
Adomnáin, or law of innocents, was pronounced. The town itself is an old market
and former garrison town dating to the 1620s.
