Columnists

There was a tiny little townland in County Clare called Ballykilty. In the middle of the 18th century when the landed aristocracy was in the ascendency, a man, who had never set foot in Ireland, bought extensive lands in the area. He duly renamed his lands in that townland as […]

The ‘Cailleach Bhéara’ (Hag of Beara) is a mythical old woman in Irish literature and folklore, associated with west Munster, but especially with the Beara Peninsula in West Cork.  Originally her name was ‘Boí’, a variant of the word for a cow, ‘bó’,  At the tip of the Beara Peninsula […]

“From about the middle of the 18th century it began to be realized that you could learn from a dead body; and that’s when some families were starting to be persuaded that they should allow post mortems.”– Wendy Moore In the 18th and 19th centuries medical and surgical students needed […]