Edenmoor

1150 days ago

Reading the family papers: it is easy to be reduced to tears

Among those things I collected from the house of my late father in Shipston yesterday were some ancient photo albums and several boxes of family papers and documents. I have started reading but these things almost make me tearful.  

1163 days ago

Photo Article from the Welsh Hovel: Jane Tomlinson, My Grandfather in his Brideshead days & the portraits of a naked ex girlfriend dilemma

We moved to the Welsh Hovel 21 months ago and still we have some things in cardboard packing boxes. Not a lot but enough. But as rooms are renovated, one by one, and furniture is added, gradually those boxes can be unpacked. In a month or so I shall also be picking up more furniture from my late father’s house in Shipston including two more Victorian bookcases and so this week I have been going through those cardboard boxes.

2384 days ago

A gobshite Dublin taxi driver explains African famine to a descendent of a wicked Donegal squire

170 years ago my Church of Ireland forebears were sitting happily at Edenmoor, a country house in Donegal with bellies full while in the fields outside the poor catholics starved. Actually Donegal got off relatively lightly with its population falling by less than 20%. In Clare or Mayo the events of the Irish famine were truly terrible. A million Irish folks died and the same number emigrated. There is little doubt that British Corn Laws and the exploitative nature of the Landlord tenant relationship added to the woes of the potato blight. We Brits & the Cochranes of Ballybofey and their ilk have a good deal to answer for.