Search Results for 'Maria Edgeworth'

A new and exciting audio tour has been launched to guide visitors along Longford’s 73km Literary Trail.

A new and exciting audio tour has been launched to guide visitors along Longford’s 73km Literary Trail. The audio tour, which celebrates Longford’s rich literary history at nine points along the trail, is now freely accessible to visitors online at Longford.ie.

During the first 20 years of the 19th century Maria Edgeworth was the most successful and celebrated living novelist. With her friends Sir Culling Smith and his lady wife they had travelled from Edgeworthstown, Co Longford, to Galway, and from there they planned a leisurely holiday in Connemara.

‘ The case is exciting intense interest, and already the sheriff is over-powered with applications for admission to the court, but the police have taken precautions to prevent any undue overcrowding’.

After her Connemara tour Maria Edgeworth kept up a correspondence with the Martins. She followed their fortunes and misfortunes with all the attention of an enthralled novel-reader. There was plenty to hold her attention. In the spring of 1835 the Martins travelled to London where Mary was presented at court and moved in fashionable society, attending dinner parties and charity events, of which a cynical Lord Byron remarked that these galas were nothing less than a marriage market.

As the legendary Colonel Richard Martin neared the end of his life in Boulogne, where he had fled to escape his numerous creditors, a large four-horse carriage, on which two postilions, in jackets of dark-blue frieze, guided the coach on horse-back, arrived at the front door of Ballynahinch. It was dark, and its occupants were in a state of near exhaustion.

The village of the Claddagh was a unique collection of thatched houses arranged in a very random fashion, occupied by a few thousand souls. They had their own customs, spoke mainly in Irish, intermarried each other, had their own code of laws, and elected their own king. He was quite powerful in many respects and usually solved local disputes. Claddagh people rarely went outside the village to courts of justice. Virtually the entire male population was involved in fishing, but when they landed their catch, it was the women who took over. They were the members of the family who went out and sold the product.

Athlone's Abbey Road Artists’ Studios is delighted to introduce its newest resident artist, Ciara Tuite.

Continuing his wry and sardonic observations on the personalities, and the heaving populated life that he encounters on the roads, towns and villages along the way, the young William Makepeace Thackeray continued his journey through Connemara. In 1842 he spent four months on an extensive tour of this island, and later published his observations in the well received Irish Sketch Book to which he added numerous drawings mainly of the people he met. Yet for all his sceptical comments he is genuinely moved by the landscape of Connemara, and writes eloquently on intimate moments.

Continuing his wry and sardonic observations on the personalities, and the heaving populated life that he encounters on the roads, towns and villages along the way, the young William Makepeace Thackeray continued his journey through Connemara. In 1842 he spent four months on an extensive tour of this island, and later published his observations in the well received Irish Sketch Book to which he added numerous drawings mainly of the people he met. Yet for all his sceptical comments he is genuinely moved by the landscape of Connemara, and writes eloquently on intimate moments.