I am a big fan of National Heritage Week. On many days there are so many things on that I have to miss something that I might otherwise attend. That cannot be a bad complaint.
Last Saturday, I managed to visit eight of the buildings on the Heritage Open Day and would have liked to have visited even more – a very enjoyable day.
Last night, I took a spin to Listowel for a great talk by Tom Horgan on Republican Monuments in North Kerry. I did manage to stop and photograph three monuments myself on the way there, outside Kanturk, in Newmarket and in Rockchapel as well as a few other gems.
As you may have noticed from the posts and the pages here, I am interested in things that are on public display in many areas but we tend not to know how many there actually are – this has prompted me to stop and photograph the likes of grottos, roadside death commemorations, postboxes, as well as memorials to War of Independence/Civil War.
Last night reinforced what I said last week that I definitely need to upload and catalogue all of the photographs that I have of the monuments.
Last night educated me as to the locations of very many more monuments and plaques to be photographed and recorded – whenever I can programme in another trip to the Listowel, Ballybunnion, Ballyduff and Tarbert areas of North Kerry.
Tom Horgan’s talk was very well delivered. He selected maybe ten or so or the lesser known monuments and then spoke on the monument and the person commemorated. It really put so much flesh on what is otherwise a carved stone. The amount of research carried out on each individual, their battles and even the people with whom they associated (or fought) must have been so time consuming as the distilled information presented was so extensive.
The presentation and delivery were excellent. I suspect that I was not alone among the audience of fifty to sixty who very much enjoyed the evening.
If you see a talk by Tom Horgan on this or a similar topic, I do recommend.