Tag: Ireland

  • SEVEN-SWANS-A-SWIMMING

    Lir was a great lord who ruled the lands of the white hill. His fields were bountiful, his rule prosperous and his people content. Lir and his wife Aodb were happy and they had two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, when Aodb fell pregnant again. This time she bore twins, two fine boys, […]

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  • ESKRAGH

    We buried Thomas’s da today. We put him in the same patch of ground that we had pretended we were putting Thomas. Eighteen months. I never thought the old man would last so long. The day was bright, clear and warm but there wasn’t much of a crowd. A couple of the fellas that he’d […]

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  • KING ROOK

    I grew up in a housing estate that was built on a gently-rising hillside. The top of the hill was ringed with trees, ancient sessile oaks, wych elm and horse chestnut. You wouldn’t call it a forest, it’s not that big, but it’s a bit more than a few random trees. We called it Hangman’s […]

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  • AND DUBLIN WEPT

    They sent me out to Swords to get Willy O’Brien. I handed him the message and watched his lips form a tight line. He looked up, rubbed his nose where his glasses rested, then climbed into the cab of the lump of an Austin lorry I’d borrowed. We bounced along the road back to Dublin, […]

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  • FRIDAY’S WORDS OF WISDOM: THE TRIADS OF IRELAND BY KUNO MEYER

    The Triads of Ireland by Kuno Meyer (1906, available from Project Gutenberg) is a collection of a specifically Irish form of poetry popular amongst Irish bards that probably date from the Ninth Century[i]. They are, as the name suggests, based on threes – they’re sometimes witty, sometimes profound, sometimes strange and I discovered them recently […]

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