In Search of Ireland
Author : Henry Vollam Morton
Publisher :
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 27,7 MB
Release : 1931
Category : Ireland
ISBN :
In Search of Ireland
Author : H. V. Morton
Publisher : Methuen Pub Limited
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 15,9 MB
Release : 2000-01
Category : Travel
ISBN : 9780413548504
Book Description
One of the classic travel books about Ireland by one of the century's best-selling writers. Shortly after the declaration of the Irish Free State, H. V. Morton goes in search of Ireland by motor-car and finds, amongst other things, a Norman village in Galway, lobster fishermen, a shy girl in need of an apron in Connemara, and a great many beds in which Michael Collins is said to have slept. Full of local stories and wayside conversations, Morton's witty and enticing travelogue recalls a way of life not quite disappeared even at the beginning of a new century. Anecdotal, leisurely, full of character and event, insight, and opinion, this is travel writing of the very highest order.
In Search of Ancient Ireland
Author : Carmel McCaffrey
Publisher : Ivan R. Dee
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 28,84 MB
Release : 2003-06-11
Category : History
ISBN : 1461655692
Book Description
This engaging book traces the history, archaeology, and legends of ancient Ireland from 9000 B.C., when nomadic hunter-gatherers appeared in Ireland at the end of the last Ice Age to 1167 A.D., when a Norman invasion brought the country under control of the English crown for the first time. So much of what people today accept as ancient Irish history—Celtic invaders from Europe turning Ireland into a Celtic nation; St. Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland and converting its people to Christianity—is myth and legend with little basis in reality. The truth is more interesting. The Irish, as the authors show, are not even Celtic in an archaeological sense. And there were plenty of bishops in Ireland before a British missionary called Patrick arrived. But In Search of Ancient Ireland is not simply the story of events from long ago. Across Ireland today are festivals, places, and folk customs that provide a tangible link to events thousands of years past. The authors visit and describe many of these places and festivals, talking to a wide variety of historians, scholars, poets, and storytellers in the very settings where history happened. Thus the book is also a journey on the ground to uncover ten thousand years of Irish identity. In Search of Ancient Ireland is the official companion to the three-part PBS documentary series. With 14 black-and-white photos, 6 b&w illustrations, and 1 map.
In Search of Ireland
Author : Brian Graham
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 35,56 MB
Release : 2002-11-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 1134749171
Book Description
In Search of Ireland argues that Ireland's political problems are created by conflicts and confusions of identity. It brings together a number of distinguished contributors, each of whom examines a particular aspect of Ireland's diverse cultural geography and history. Issues covered include: the changing definitions of Irishness the roles of class and gender in constructing traditional alignments of identity the role of ethnicity in Irish society the invention and imagining of Irish 'place' the political implications of a pluralistic Ireland The contributors demonstrate that many people both inside and outside of Ireland continue to define themselves and their conflicts through simple sectarian stereotypes. The authors argue that politicians and others must reject these outdated either/or representations and accommodate instead the fluidity of Irish identity. James Anderson, University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne S.J. Connolly, Queens's University, Belfast Neville Douglas, Queen's University, Belfast Brian Graham, University of Ulste
A Course Called Ireland
Author : Tom Coyne
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 26,45 MB
Release : 2010-02-02
Category : Travel
ISBN : 1592405282
Book Description
The hysterical story bestseller about one man's epic Celtic sojourn in search of ancestors, nostalgia, and the world's greatest round of golf By turns hilarious and poetic, A Course Called Ireland is a magnificent tour of a vibrant land and paean to the world's greatest game in the tradition of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. In his thirties, married, and staring down impending fatherhood, Tom Coyne was familiar with the last refuge of the adult male: the golfing trip. Intent on designing a golf trip to end all others, Coyne looked to Ireland, the place where his father has taught him to love the game years before. As he studied a map of the island and plotted his itinerary, it dawn on Coyne that Ireland was ringed with golf holes. The country began to look like one giant round of golf, so Coyne packed up his clubs and set off to play all of it-on foot. A Course Called Ireland is the story of a walking-averse golfer who treks his way around an entire country, spending sixteen weeks playing every seaside hole in Ireland. Along the way, he searches out his family's roots, discovers that a once-poor country has been transformed by an economic boom, and finds that the only thing tougher to escape than Irish sand traps are Irish pubs.
The Back Of Beyond
Author : James Charles Roy
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 44,78 MB
Release : 2009-02-18
Category : History
ISBN : 0786745215
Book Description
James Charles Roy, a noted authority on Irish history and travel, escorts a disparate group of Americans through the lonely backwaters of ancient Ireland. Visions of a glorious enterprise evaporate as he sees a dejected and weary handful of aged American tourists disembark at Shannon Airport. Fortified by Guinness, Roy hurls himself into sharing with them the joys and wonders of Ireland's twisted byways. Determined to avoid clichéRoy leads his group to obscure Celtic coronation sites, monasteries, and remote abbeys as he spins a narrative that pulls Ireland's chaotic story into coherence. His unsuspecting charges begin to shed their hesitancies, relishing their guide's idiosyncratic approach to Ireland. Black comedy aside, Roy touches an emotional chord: how the economic phenomenon known as the Celtic Tiger has transformed Old Ireland into a high-tech power. At the tour's end, Roy embarks alone for the inaccessible Ardoilean, a seventh-century Celtic hermitage in County Galway. His vision of an Ireland lost forever is an emotional tour de force.
Island of the Setting Sun
Author : Anthony Murphy
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 37,60 MB
Release : 2020-07-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9781916099852
Book Description
Ireland is home to some of the world's oldest astronomically-aligned structures, giant stone monuments erected over 5,000 years ago. Despite their apparent simplicity, these megalithic edifices were crafted by a scientifically knowledgeable community of farmers who endeavoured to enshrine their beliefs in a stellar afterlife within the very fabric of their cleverly-designed stone temples.Finally back in print, this reissued edition presents evidence suggesting the builders of monuments such as Newgrange and its Boyne Valley counterparts were adept astronomers, cunning engineers and capable surveyors. Their huge monuments are memorials in stone and earth, commemorating their creators' perceived unity with the cosmos and enshrining a belief system which resulted from a crossover between science and spirituality.As investigation of this awe-inspiring civilisation of people continues on many levels, evidence is emerging that significant archaeological sites dating from deep in prehistory are linked - not just through mythology, archaeology and cosmology - but through an arrangement of complex, and in some cases astonishing, alignments. Some of these alignments of ancient sites stretch from one side of Ireland to another.While the accounts of the lives of some prominent Irish saints appear to be steeped in folklore and mystery, it seems from new interpretations of the literature that the cosmic world view which existed in Neolithic Ireland experienced a continuity right into the Early Christian period.Join us on this fascinating exploration of stones, stars and stories."The sheer amount of information contained within the book is mind-boggling. It is well thought out and structured . . . The more you read the evidence the more convinced you become."- Astronomy & Space magazine"Refreshing and fascinating . . . a wonderful magical book, sumptuously illustrated and a must for anyone who loves to delve deep into our past." - Kenny's Irish Bookshop"A fascinating insight into Ireland's ancient burial sites" - Irish Independent"A monument" - Drogheda Independent"It is a beautiful book and very well written. The information that you collected is outstanding." - Barbara Carter, co-author, The Myth of the Year and The Goddess and the Bull"The authors . . . reach interesting and challenging conclusions about the significance of ancient astronomical knowledge. The book is jammed with colour illustrations, maps and photographs. A thoroughly interesting read!" - Archaeology Ireland."An essential book that demonstrates just how much the beliefs and practicesof our ancestors were influenced by the movement of the stars, in particularthose of the constellation Cygnus - the celestial swan and Northern Cross -once seen as a source of life and the destination of the soul in death. Amust have tome for all those passionate about what remains of our fastdisappearing ritual monuments of the prehistoric age." - Andrew Collins, author of The Cygnus Mystery
Nineteenth-Century Ireland (New Gill History of Ireland 5)
Author : D. George Boyce
Publisher : Gill & Macmillan Ltd
Page : 556 pages
File Size : 36,87 MB
Release : 2005-09-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0717160963
Book Description
The elusive search for stability is the subject of Professor D. George Boyce's Nineteenth-Century Ireland, the fifth in the New Gill History of Ireland series. Nineteenth-century Ireland began and ended in armed revolt. The bloody insurrections of 1798 were the proximate reasons for the passing of the Act of Union two years later. The 'long nineteenth century' lasted until 1922, by which the institutions of modern Ireland were in place against a background of the Great War, the Ulster rebellion and the armed uprising of the nationalist Ireland. The hope was that, in an imperial structure, the ethnic, religious and national differences of the inhabitants of Ireland could be reconciled and eliminated. Nationalist Ireland mobilised a mass democratic movement under Daniel O'Connell to secure Catholic Emancipation before seeing its world transformed by the social cataclysm of the Great Irish Potato Famine. At the same time, the Protestant north-east of Ulster was feeling the first benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Although post-Famine Ireland modernised rapidly, only the north-east had a modern economy. The mixture of Protestantism and manufacturing industry integrated into the greater United Kingdom and gave a new twist to the traditional Irish Protestant hostility to Catholic political demands. In the home rule period from the 1880s to 1914, the prospect of partition moved from being almost unthinkable to being almost inevitable. Nineteenth-century Ireland collapsed in the various wars and rebellions of 1912–22. Like many other parts of Europe than and since, it had proved that an imperial superstructure can contain domestic ethnic rivalries, but cannot always eliminate them. Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Table of Contents Introduction - The Union: Prelude and Aftermath, 1798–1808 - The Catholic Question and Protestant Answers, 1808–29 - Testing the Union, 1830–45 - The Land and its Nemesis, 1845–9 - Political Diversity, Religious Division, 1850–69 - The Shaping of Irish Politics (1): The Making of Irish Nationalism, 1870–91 - The Shaping of Irish Politics (2): The Making of Irish Unionism, 1870–93 - From Conciliation to Confrontation, 1891–1914 - Modernising Ireland, 1834–1914 - The Union Broken, 1914–23 - Stability and Strife in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
Life in Ireland
Author : Conor W. O'Brien
Publisher : Merrion Press
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 50,44 MB
Release : 2021-04-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1785373862
Book Description
This is the story of life in Ireland – a story half a billion years in the making. With its castles, crannogs and passage tombs, Ireland is a land where history looms large, but the saga of life on this island dates back millions of years before the first people set foot here. In Life in Ireland, Conor O’Brien guides the reader on a journey around the island to explore the history of natural life here, from the Jurassic Coast of Antrim to the great Ice Age bone-beds of Cork. Along the way, we’ll meet some of the astonishing creatures to have called Ireland home through the ages: shelled monsters; huge marine lizards; armoured dinosaurs; giant deer; mighty mammoths. Vital strands in the story of life on Earth have left their mark here, including some of the first creatures to crawl onto land or take to the wing. This epic journey will take us from the first fossils to the present day, to see how our wildlife has adapted to the human age and explore what the future might hold for life in Ireland.
My Father Left Me Ireland
Author : Michael Brendan Dougherty
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 40,66 MB
Release : 2019-04-30
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0525538674
Book Description
The perfect gift for parents this Father’s Day: a beautiful, gut-wrenching memoir of Irish identity, fatherhood, and what we owe to the past. “A heartbreaking and redemptive book, written with courage and grace.” –J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy “…a lovely little book.” –Ross Douthat, The New York Times The child of an Irish man and an Irish-American woman who split up before he was born, Michael Brendan Dougherty grew up with an acute sense of absence. He was raised in New Jersey by his hard-working single mother, who gave him a passion for Ireland, the land of her roots and the home of Michael's father. She put him to bed using little phrases in the Irish language, sang traditional songs, and filled their home with a romantic vision of a homeland over the horizon. Every few years, his father returned from Dublin for a visit, but those encounters were never long enough. Devastated by his father's departures, Michael eventually consoled himself by believing that fatherhood was best understood as a check in the mail. Wearied by the Irish kitsch of the 1990s, he began to reject his mother's Irish nationalism as a romantic myth. Years later, when Michael found out that he would soon be a father himself, he could no longer afford to be jaded; he would need to tell his daughter who she is and where she comes from. He immediately re-immersed himself in the biographies of firebrands like Patrick Pearse and studied the Irish language. And he decided to reconnect with the man who had left him behind, and the nation just over the horizon. He began writing letters to his father about what he remembered, missed, and longed for. Those letters would become this book. Along the way, Michael realized that his longings were shared by many Americans of every ethnicity and background. So many of us these days lack a clear sense of our cultural origins or even a vocabulary for expressing this lack--so we avoid talking about our roots altogether. As a result, the traditional sense of pride has started to feel foreign and dangerous; we've become great consumers of cultural kitsch, but useless conservators of our true history. In these deeply felt and fascinating letters, Dougherty goes beyond his family's story to share a fascinating meditation on the meaning of identity in America.
