Hervey organised elaborate games and competitions between local clergymen, inviting his most overweight vicars to splendid dinners without portion control and then ordering after-dinner races over bogland, or calling for jumping competitions on full stomachs. For his delight, he organised cross-community horse-racing along Downhill strand, pitting lean and fit Presbyterians against his own overfed ministers … Read more
The remnants and ruins of Hervey’s vast building projects still punctuate the landscape of Ulster—he ordered the building of stately glebe houses and added elegant spires to plain Protestant churches, determined, as he wrote, ‘to make the County of Derry look like a gentleman’. Most gentlemanly of all are the magnificent ruins at Downhill, where … Read more
English/Scottish Sir Henry Sidney, lord deputy during Shane O’Neill’s time and during the attempted plantations in the 1570s. Sir Thomas Smith, English civil servant and polymath who organised the failed plantation of north Down in 1572. Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, who instigated the failed plantation of south Antrim in 1573. Sir Thomas Norris … Read more
‘These men deck themselves out in big hairy coats, over their heads in the same way as the women wear their cloaks in Brabant. This coat only goes a half-quarter beyond the belt, and over this is a long linen apron. Thus shorn, bearded, armed and barefoot—as I said—imagine how strange this costume is to … Read more
The minutes of the annual meeting of the trustees of Marsh’s Library in October 1916 noted the ‘damage caused to the Library and its contents by the Sinn Féin Rebellion’. The library was directly in the line of fire between the insurgents’ position at Jacob’s biscuit factory and the barracks of the Dublin Metropolitan Police … Read more