Newest Field Club Journal is packed with items of interest
THE latest edition of the Sligo Field Club Journal has been published. Volume 7 – edited by Martin Timoney with help from senior assistant editor Fiona Doherty and assistant editor Jim Foran - features 208 pages of entries and images relating to the history of Sligo and its surrounding areas.
This is the largest volume of the Sligo Field Club Journal to date and introduces some new authors and topics.
Articles in Volume 7 include Seventy Years of Palaeoecological Investigations in Treanscrabbagh Townland, Briecklieve Mountains, Co Sligo by Susanne Stolze, a graduate of Kiel University, on her research of the ancient botany of the Carrowmore and Carrowkeel passage tombs. Though now in Boulder, Colorado she is applying for further research through Harvard University to continue the Sligo research with copy of this volume in hand.
Pádraig Meehan’s Campfire Fever Unbridled: Kings of the Irish Neolithic? is a piece, asking questions, putting humans into the picture. Recent Irish studies involving ancient genetics (many from this region) have inspired renewed interest in the social dynamics of the time of change from the hunter-farmer-gatherers of the Mesolithic to the settled farming communities of the Neolithic. Carrowkeel Carrowmore and Maugheraboy get copious mention. This is the first theoretical article in the Journal so far. Eamon Cody, formerly of the Megalithic Survey of Ireland and the National Monuments Service, provides four secure dates, 3600 to 2500BC, on cremation human bone from Cairn K of the Carrowkeel Passage Tomb Complex.
Frank Clinton writes about a shale axehead from Friarstown, Dromahair which he found by chance while gathering stones from a football pitch in Dromahair in September 1984; it includes a superb drawing by Kelvin Busher of Galway.
Dirk Brandherm, Cormac McSparron, Linda Boutoille and Thorsten Kahlert, write on their ongoing research and excavations on the top of Knocknashee mountain, north of Achonry. This is proving to be an unusual open Bronze Age hilltop settlement where excavations continued this August.
Jim Higgins writes about St. Dominic in Medieval to Post-Medieval Irish Art. Since 1252 the Dominicans have been a part of Sligo life, and still are. The medieval Abbey can be easily seen from Castle Street. Surprisingly, there does not seem to be a statue of St Dominic in the High Street-Dominic Street complex. Higgins uses 36 illustrations of St. Dominic, in stone, glass, fabric, and silver, to tell his story. Martin Timoney, editor and research archaeologist, writes about Rathscanlan and Ballyara just west of Tubbercurry, as an ancestral place of Ó hEára Riabhach. This encourages the study of 13th and 14th century earthen moated sites. The article includes a list of horizontal mills extracted from the 1633-1635 survey published by Wood-Martin in 1889. This article is a challenge to find the sites. Tom Cunney from Lisaniska in Kilmacteige, living in Athlone, made a working model of one such mill, based on that found at Kilbegly, Co.
Roscommon, and now on display in Drum Visitor Centre, a few kilometres west of Athlone. The O’Hara castle at Ballyara has been robbed out and the adjacent church is not much better. To the north is a massive earthen enclosure, probably an O’Hara site of earlier significance. The settlement, founded in 1396 was in this Ballyara area before relocating to the present site. This is the first landscape archaeology article to appear in Sligo Field Club Journal.
Nollaig Ó Muraíle provides some detailed notes on the family of O Hara and their territory of Leyny. This is a follow-up to Martin A Timoney’s article.
Elaine Conroy writes about Court Abbey, a Franciscan third order regular friary in Lavagh which was built in the 1450s. This isolated ruin at the foot of Knocknashee is unique in Co. Sligo for having designs made into the wet plaster of the south transept; at least one late 15th/early 16th ship is recognizable in the designs as also is part of a painted crucifixion scene.
John McKeon’s article, Ahamlish Parish, Co. Sligo, 1800-1880: A Time of Much Change covers education, structures and is illustrated by plans of buildings, maps showing the squaring of the land, hitherto unpublished maps such as that of Cliffoney in 1796, Derryleghan lime kiln of 1825-1827, and sea steps in Castlegal.
Sligo Weekender editor Peter Henry, in the second part of his series on some Sligo-related armorial bookplates illustrates the bookplates of three Sligo people with archaeological connections, including that of the Wynne family of Hazelwood.
John Mullaney, in his article Time is a River – Marcus Aurelius, writes in his own wonderful style about things made in Sligo, clocks, glass, pottery ceramics, furniture, trades that kept people in Sligo employed and kept money circulating within the town and county.
Eamonn Kelly, formerly Keeper of Irish Antiquities in the National Museum of Ireland, investigates Moytura, Co. Sligo; a mythic landscape associated with an epic battle. However, Moytura also contained a Formaoil or royal hunting preserve of the kingdom of Tír nAilella, (Tirerrill, Co. Sligo).
Don Cotton and Micheline Sheehy Skeffington review the Strawberry Tree around Lough Gill. The evidence is that the tree was present long before Wynne came to Hazelwood, so it was not introduced by him.
Catherine O’Connor lovingly writes about her father Frank, who was clerk of works with the National Monuments Section of the Office of Public Works, based in Parke’s Castle and later in Dromahair. He was president of Sligo Field Club in 1990 and 1991.
Martin Wilson’s presidential piece, Working Together, treats of our diverse committee, standards, need for new members, lectures by Zoom, sligofieldclub.ie, preserving and enjoying what we have. It is a rallying call for the troops to use the power of the keyboard in either the Journal or the local media to advance our goals. Martin Timoney’s piece, While we are waiting for the future to arrive!, is on the what the content of the proposed new Sligo museum should be, the extensive space and staff needed, and where it should be located. This piece is an academic view from a research archaeologist. On the other hand, John Quinn, current secretary of Sligo Field Club, has a piece entitled “The ‘One Sligo Museum’” where he adds considerably more to the themes in Timoney’s piece. It also addresses the significant benefits to Sligo, town and county, from a business point of view, hospitality, shops, longer overnight stays. The new museum will say “this is where we live and we are proud of it, so come and stay and see and enjoy, not just within the town but in the county at large”.
Volume 7 of the Sligo Field Club Journal is €25 and is available from club committee members, Liber and Eason bookshops in Sligo, Geraldine Brennan at the Laundry Basket in Tubbercurry, Michael McHugh in Cliffoney at Cliffoney Celtic, Rogers Hardware, McGettrick's Drapery and Caseys Chemist in Ballymote, Seán Gallagher at Garrow Filling Station in Grange and Martin Baker Butcher in Riverstown.
Meanwhile, the deadline for submissions for Volume 8 is December 19.