Some Offaly Wills of the Dames and Longworth families of Tullamore, Greenhills (Rhode) and Glynwood, and that of Sir William Petty with lands in Ballyboy barony. Tim O’Neill

The old cemetery at Lynally where Dames and Rector Coffey are buried. No stone has been found for Dames.

 

The Longworth family and George Dames of Tullamore
Reading in the National Archives some time ago I came upon a small envelope of papers that Athlone-born Revd George Stokes had put together on the Longworth family. He was constructing a family tree and it was that family’s connections with Athlone that appealed to him. The envelope included two Wills. One was that of George Dames of Tullamore, dated 1662, who died in June, 1666. In it, Dames is described as a yeoman. The Dames and the Longworth families intermarried in successive generations and it is no surprise that this Will was filed with some of the Wills of the Longworth family. They were both Cromwellian families that settled in the midlands.

Some datestones in Tullamore: a walking/or cycling tour quiz for young people.

Now that more young people can get our walking and cylcling we give you this suggested  tour to find the datestones in and about the town of Tullamore. We are giving a free copy of Tullamore a Portrait to the first five entries received with one or more additions to this list. Entries will be drawn from the barrel. So email us at info@offalyhistory.com headed Tullamore Datestone Quiz. Our blog is published every Saturday and we are providing a second issue on Wednesdays during the Covid Period.

FAITHFUL IMAGES: Offaly through the eyes of artists. Fergal MacCabe

Clonmacnoise from the Harris’s edition of Ware’s Antiquities (Dublin 1739) showing the work of Blaymires and Dempsy his companion. 

It must be conceded that the unassertive landscapes of County Offaly have never been a great source of inspiration to painters, most of whom just made a quick stop at historic Clonmacnoise before dashing on to record the West of Ireland.
Yet, others took the trouble to look more closely (or were paid to do so) and found inspiration in its lush farmland, bogs and woods, slow rivers, rolling hills and ancient ruins. Happily, their numbers have grown in the recent past.

The Cotton Map
The first, and in my opinion the finest, artistic image of Offaly is the Cotton Map of 1565. Prepared to assist the Elizabethan Plantation, this is an imaginative creation more akin to Harry Potter’s ‘Marauder Map’ or Robert Louis Stevenson’s chart of Treasure Island than a realistic cartographic exercise. One wonders if its unknown compilers ever visited Offaly or were relying on travellers’ tales.

Snap shots of an early summer’s day: a Tullamore CBS school sports in the late 1960s.

It was generally in late May of each year that school tours and school sports were held and provide happy memories of times past. Besides the serious stuff there were lots of fun events such as the sack race, the egg and spoon, wheelbarrow and much more. Charleville Demesne, Tullamore had sports days back in the 1830s for its tenantry with events such as climbing a greasy pole and other fun and frolics fit to be described by Carleton or Hardy. These early efforts have been much studied and collated in early tomes such as Blaine’s Rural Sports and W.H. Maxwell’s Wild sports of the West. Durrow, Tullamore man, Paul Rouse, has surveyed the traditional sporting pattern and the onward commercialising and politicisation of sports by the late nineteenth century in his acclaimed history published as Sport and Ireland (2015).

BALLOONATICS AND THE GREAT FIRE OF TULLAMORE ON 10 MAY 1785. Michael Byrne

The balloon fire of 10 May 1785 (235 years ago tomorrow) is perhaps the best known event in the history of Tullamore. Today we are reminded of it every time we see the town crest and in the past with the annual celebration – the Tullamore Phoenix Festival. The first premium whiskey from the new Tullamore DEW (Phoenix, 2013) was in honour of that tradition. It is hardly surprising that it should be so. The event caught the imagination at the time and was widely reported in the national newspapers and by visitors in their publications thereafter. Unfortunately, many turned to the Wikipedia of those days – the previous fellow’s account – and did not seek to get all the facts and record them. What we are left with then are the few contemporary accounts from national newspapers, the comments of a succession of visitors who seemed to rely on the diary entry of John Wesley in 1787, and the notes of Charles Coote in his published survey of King’s County (Offaly) in 1801. Wesley, the great preacher and founder of Methodism, unlike Coote, would have known the town well as he visited the place some twenty times from the late 1740s to the 1780s. Why are there so few accounts?

Poems and ballads of Edward (the Poet) Egan: a window on the social and political history of Tullamore in the 1890s

A view of the Egan Cottage, Meelaghans, Tullamore, County Offaly, birthplace of Edward Egan. This view of c. 1905–15 is reproduced from William M. Egan (ed.), Pioneering the West, 1846 to 1878. Major Howard Egan’s diary etc. Utah, 1917. Reprinted c.1995. The home of Howard Egan, now famous in American Mormon history 

A new book comprising a selection of fifty of the poems and ballads of Edward Egan of the Meelaghans, Tullamore has just been published by Offaly History. The book was edited by Michael Byrne, Anne O’Rourke and Tim O’Rourke and is a fitting tribute to a man who died 80 years ago and in his time was revered throughout the midlands for his timely poetic commentaries on the social and political scene in his native county and his appreciation of all that was beautiful within a day’s walk of his home place.

Interesting Graves and Graveyards of Offaly. By Stephen Callaghan

Back in 2014 I was an intern in the Heritage Office in Offaly County Council. I compiled a database of all known post 1700 burial grounds in the county. Compiling the database required thorough desk and field based research. During fieldwork I visited 170 of the 187 burial grounds I recorded. While visiting these places I noted many interesting and unusual features, some of which are the basis for this blog post. The list is of course subjective. There are certainly more interesting and unique features waiting to be discovered in Offaly burial grounds.

Mrs King, John Plunkett Joly, William Davis and…You! Diary-writing in Offaly in the 19th century and a 21st century call for historians of the pandemic.

Diaries offer a fascinating glimpse into history through the personal accounts of people who lived through war, famine, disease, revolution and other events of huge social disruption. Along with contemporary correspondence, personal diaries help to flesh out the bare facts of history with human experience, where otherwise official records are the only historical source. Find out how you can help us to record the history of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic in Offaly and join a long line of Offaly diarists who have shaped our understanding of the past.

Memories of the Kerin family of Clara in the first half of the 20th century. By Sylvia Turner

Offaly History is delighted to welcome a new contributor this week who has generously shared her mother’s memoirs of life in Clara in the 1930s.

My mother, Ethel Clarke neé Kerin, wrote memoirs in later life of the time before she moved to England after World War II. Clara figured a great deal in the stories that she told me about her childhood and she clearly held very fond memories of the town. 

Her mother, Elizabeth Evans, came from nearby Geashill and was employed as a servant in the household of Joshua Clibborn Goodbody at Beechmount, Clara. Her sister, Mary Anne Evans, known as Poll also worked in Clara, employed as a housemaid/domestic servant at Charlestown. It was here where Poll met her future husband, Robert Stewart, who was employed as a coachman.

RSA1 members visit Durrow, Tihilly, Rahan, Lynally and Killeigh in Monastic Offaly in 1896. Michael Byrne

Durrow Abbey in 1914. The First World War had just started. 

Leaving to one side the work  of the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s, the work of Petrie at Clonmacnois, and that of Cooke at Birr in 1826 and 1875, the references to and work done or written up on the historical sites of north Offaly in the nineteenth century are hard to come by. Fr Cogan published historical material on the Offaly parishes in the diocese of Meath in his three-volume work, 1862-1870; Thomas Stanley corresponded with the Royal Society of Antiquaries (RSAI) in 1869 in regard to the nine-hole stone or bullaun at the Meelaghans while Stanley Coote contributed an illustration of Ballycowan Castle for the Memorials of the Dead – a published record from the 1880s to the 1930s of selected tombstone inscriptions in Ireland and in County Offaly.