Tag: genealogy

The Unquiet Land

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

the good life of the gentry kept her there, an eccentric about whom stories would be told long after her name was forgotten. Her son Finn, her fifth of six children, inherited his mother’s love of the mountains and the sea. The sea, however, is faithless and fickle and given to unpredictable outbursts of savagely bad temper. One Friday in January 1854, a large fishing fleet set sail from Carraghlin harbour in fine, sunny conditions. But some hours later those benign conditions changed dramatically, the tranquil sea turned tempestuous, and the fleet was storm-tossed in gales and driving snow. Thirty-six Carraghlin fishermen perished. Among them were Finn MacLir’s twin brothers. The date was Friday, the thirteenth.
That same year, 1854, Finn himself was a sailor on board the tea clipper, Gypsy Lady. Having crossed the South China Sea from the ancient walled city of Fuzhou with a full load of the first tea of the season, the clipper ship caught fire on the thirtieth of May in the Sunda Strait, off the coast of Indonesia. Aware that his crew were unable to control the raging fire, the captain took the decision to sink the fast, sleek ship. Some of the crew, including Finn MacLir, scuttled her by cutting holes on the waterline, and she sank in seventy-three feet of water.
Finn swashed through a life of Conradian adventures till 1880. Then the Land League, a political organisation founded in County Mayo in 1878 with the aim of helping poor tenant farmers to win back “the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland,” embarked on a campaign of violence across the ravaged countryside. The principal aim of the Land League was to abolish landlordism in Ireland so as to enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. So began the so-called Land War. Tenants refused to pay their rents, resisted evictions, attacked land agents. English-owned farms were burned, animals killed or maimed, haystacks set ablaze, the English owners set on like curs. The land-owning MacLir family, close friends of the land-usurping Hamiltons, was targeted. In one bleak October night old Brigadier Richard Hamilton was brutally butchered in his bed, and Finn’s father and older brother were locked in the barn behind their large house, and the hay-filled barn was set on fire. Bullets from the hill above kept any would-be rescuers away until the blazing barn collapsed in on itself and on the two hapless men within.
When his father and brother were murdered during the Land War disturbances, and both his sisters had married and moved to England with their husbands, Finn MacLir returned to Corrymore and took over the farm. He stayed on in the village, out of defiance, according to some;

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562888

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763203

In Turbulent Times

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

Petty Officer Joseph Ignatius Carney sat in an empty compartment, staring out sadly at the green and yellow countryside of England. The train chugged through it noisily and slowly. It looked so peaceful. Who could have believed that the country was at war, that it had just been fighting for its very survival like a fish on a hook? Now the worst was over and the battle for Britain won. But the battle for Europe was not going well. The German army had pushed into Yugoslavia and Greece. Yugoslavia had surrendered, and the future for Greece looked grim.
Here in England all of that was a world away. Cows lazily grazed the fresh spring grass. New-born lambs on new-found, nimble legs scampered after shaggy ewes. The first crops were growing in the ploughed fields, and women, girls, young boys, and old men joined farmers in waging their own war against the invidious invasion of weeds. In the few orchards that the train chugged by, the apple and the cherry trees were dressed in blossom like lovely, young spring brides. The April sun was warm, and the faces that turned to watch the train pass noisily by were tanned already. So few were young men’s faces. Many were the so-called Land Girls, thousands of them, recruited from the city to boost farm production to thwart the German blockade of imports brought to the country by sea. Barmaids, waitresses, maids, hairdressers and others working in urban female occupations proved themselves tougher in the fields than the sceptical farmers had imagined. They worked fifty hours a week in summer, forty-eight in winter, ploughing fields, driving tractors, making hay. They undertook the full rigours of harvesting, threshing, and thatching. They also reclaimed land, worked in orchards and market gardens, and though they had to steel themselves to do it, they caught rats as well. As for the men, most of England’s farming labourers were far from their fields and pastures. In other fields their tired, tense faces, rank on rank, were shaded only by their gun-barrels. They were strained and stressed and drained of colour. Or smashed to gory pulp. Or still, limestone grey, like the faces in church effigies, turned towards the blue sky, their eyes closed in the unsought peace of death.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562904

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763270