While off sick a month or so ago, I was listening to radio documentaries from RTE Radio 1. When I came across Seen From a Distance, I was reminded of a feature I had heard previously where an Irish emigrant to England returned to the family home many years after his parents’ deaths. The house still had very many personal belongings – the door was just pulled out and the house stood idle for many years. I found it strange that such properties were not sold, especially ten years ago. From driving around, there do appear to be very many idle cottages in varying state of repair – each probably with their own story as to why they now lie forgotten and unloved. The house in the documentary still had so many personal belongings – so much personal history. Connection 2 | “I walked along through the boggy terrain where a few scrawny-looking haystacks lay in the fields, through the landscape dotted with abandoned houses, and stretches of new forests. There was no sense of habitation anywhere, the population of Leitrim having decreased from 150,000 to 27,000 between 1841 and 1986 because of emigration, famine and now forestry. I understood why the forests had become an emotional issue. I thought of de Valera’s famous St Patrick’s Day broadcast in 1943 when he wished for ‘a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the rompings of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youth and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires man should live’. |
Photos through window of library in Kiltyclogher
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorFrom Cork. SUBSCRIBE
Unless otherwise specifically stated, all photographs and text are the property of www.readingthesigns.weebly.com - such work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence
Archives
December 2022
Categories
All
Blogs I Read & LinksThought & Comment
Head Rambles For the Fainthearted Bock The Robber Póló Rogha Gabriel Patrick Comerford Sentence First Felicity Hayes-McCoy 140 characters is usually enough Johnny Fallon Sunny Spells That’s How The Light Gets In See That Tea and a Peach Buildings & Things Past Built Dublin Come Here To Me Holy Well vox hiberionacum Pilgrimage in Medieval Ireland Liminal Entwinings 53degrees Ciara Meehan The Irish Aesthete Líníocht Ireland in History Day By Day Archiseek Buildings of Ireland Irish War Memorials ReYndr Abandoned Ireland The Standing Stone Time Travel Ireland Stair na hÉireann Myles Dungan Archaeouplands Wide & Convenient Streets The Irish Story Enda O’Flaherty Cork Archive Magazine Our City, Our Town West Cork History Cork’s War of Independence Cork Historical Records Rebel Cork’s Fighting Story 40 Shades of Life in Cork Roaringwater Journal |