The Quit Rent Office holds records relating to some of the Crown’s former land revenues, natural assets and franchises in Ireland between the 1660s and the 1930s. In 1923 the records were transferred to the Irish Free State. After 1943 the historic Quit Rent Office records were transferred to the Public Records Office (now the … Read more
As we move through the ‘decade of commemorations’, the problems in ‘remembering’ the Irish Civil War become apparent. Civil conflicts pose challenges to communal remembering of the past owing to their inherently divisive nature and thus are often considered best forgotten. This is ably illustrated in one of the troubling legacies of the Irish Civil … Read more
Our tale begins just after the Great Famine, when many landlords were desperate to get rid of their estates and there were people like John George Adair only too happy to buy this land cheaply. Adair wanted a hunting estate and so he bought 20,000 acres under the shadows of Muckish and Errigal mountains and … Read more
A little-noticed map made 200 years ago provides the first detailed representation of the parkland around one of Ireland’s most elaborate ‘big houses’, the recently restored mansion at Ballyfin, Co. Laois. To be found in a volume of richly coloured estate maps now preserved in the Delany Archive in Carlow College, a map (below) depicting … Read more
Christina Jessop was born in Dublin in 1878 and lived there until 1908, when she married Jack Wilson and moved with him to Cobh (then Queenstown), Co. Cork. From 1903 to 1908 she collected c. 300 picture postcards sent to her by relatives, friends and acquaintances from places as varied as London, Paris, Alaska, Switzerland … Read more