169 days ago
It is a pity, for Edenmoor in Co. Donegal is a fine place and has been restored well since my late father and I visited it back in the mid eighties. That was before the Good Friday agreement and as dad and I drove through the border counties from Belfast there was more than one inappropriate joke made about IRA men lurking in the shadows around the next corner.
1366 days ago
Among those things I collected from the house of my late father in Shipston yesterday were some ancient photo albums and several boxes of family papers and documents. I have started reading but these things almost make me tearful.
1379 days ago
We moved to the Welsh Hovel 21 months ago and still we have some things in cardboard packing boxes. Not a lot but enough. But as rooms are renovated, one by one, and furniture is added, gradually those boxes can be unpacked. In a month or so I shall also be picking up more furniture from my late father’s house in Shipston including two more Victorian bookcases and so this week I have been going through those cardboard boxes.
2600 days ago
170 years ago my Church of Ireland forebears were sitting happily at Edenmoor, a country house in Donegal with bellies full while in the fields outside the poor catholics starved. Actually Donegal got off relatively lightly with its population falling by less than 20%. In Clare or Mayo the events of the Irish famine were truly terrible. A million Irish folks died and the same number emigrated. There is little doubt that British Corn Laws and the exploitative nature of the Landlord tenant relationship added to the woes of the potato blight. We Brits & the Cochranes of Ballybofey and their ilk have a good deal to answer for.
