There is an enormous ruin a couple of miles outside Bandon, on the Timoleague road. Drivers not speeding or using their phones can’t fail to see it! This was the old Allman cotton mill. When the cotton business failed in 1826, James C. Allman turned to making whiskey. Allman’s was […]

Have you ever eaten shark? Perhaps you have, unwittingly, if you’ve tried rock salmon or huss, because they are names given by fishmongers and chippies to various species of small sharks; few people in these islands would eat them otherwise. In many parts of the world, however, shark meat is […]

There was a piece on RTE Radio 1’s ‘Sunday Miscellany’ a few weeks ago by Hugh Wheldon, a young Irish volunteer with the environmental organisation Sea Shepherd. He was aboard the ship ‘Allankay’, in the Antarctic, and talked of icebergs and polar sunsets, Cape Horn and Drake’s Passage, orcas and […]