Mount Brandon, A Poem, John B. Keane Road and The Fall of the Fitzmaurices

On Mount Brandon in October 2020

Photo; Catherine Moylan

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Photo; Eamon ÓMurchú

The Peace of Wild Things

 

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry - The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.

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On the John B. Keane Road

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A Brilliant New Book from Kay (Moloney) Caball

"After a gatherer comes a scatterer," goes the old saying.

Years of painstaking research has come to fruition in Kay's chronicle of Kerry's premier family,. The Fitzmaurice dynasty was one of the wealthiest and most powerful and well connected families in Ireland once upon a time. Now nothing, not even a shred of that great wealth, those great houses and estates remains. The story of how all of this was lost is a fascinating tale of profligacy, squandering, wealth mismanagement, internecine feuding, and infidelity. 

Kay Caball tells it well.

This buachall, Francis, has a Listowel connection. You can read letters to and fro to his Listowel agent Rev. Christopher Julian, when, once again, he was strapped for cash. The earl was constrained to sell some of his holdings to Lord Listowel and to raise a loan on his already heavily mortgaged estate.

Kay's book will be in the shops on Thursday October 28th. It will be available to buy on Kay's website

My Kerry Ancestors

in Listowel at Woulfe's bookshop, where Brenda is operating a click and collect service,  in Eason which is open as it is a newsagents, and on Amazon.