U. Cronin's Blog, page 3

Labacally – The Witch’s Bed: Chapter 8 of 19

It was shortly after my meeting with Dr Cullen that it became known around the estate that the dig had been the subject of some interest from one our local bands of vandals and bovver boys, namely our friends the … Continue reading →

Labacally – The Witch’s Bed: Chapter 7 of 19

I wanted to talk to Dr Cullen about my findings – a grand word for what amounted to the results of couple of hours’ search of duchas.ie (which hosts the Schools’ Collection) and the reading of a few popular archaeology … Continue reading →

Labacally – The Witch’s Bed: Chapter 6 of 19

From the Schools’ Collection – a collection of folklore compiled by schoolchildren in Ireland in the 1930s.  School: Monaleen, Co. Limerick. ***** “Labacally” Collector: James Cronin, sixth class Informant: Bridget O’Farrell, 85 years of age There is a place called … Continue reading →

Labacally – The Witch’s Bed: Chapter 5 of 19

A week or so later, Mountain View made it into the media. An article in The Limerick Post, which must have been picked up on by the national press, was followed by pieces in The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, The Examiner and some of … Continue reading →

Labacally – The Witch’s Bed: Chapter 4 of 19

It was, once more, through WhatsApp that we learned that a large section of the Y – about half a football pitch of wooded area and the very place where I had observed the digging of the hole that afternoon … Continue reading →

Labacally – The Witch’s Bed: Chapter 3 of 19

Causality is a funny old thing. The initial spark – the prime cause – that set off the entire chain of events which culminated in Mountain View’s short-lived national notoriety was in all probability birthed in some anonymous junior economic … Continue reading →

Labacally – The Witch’s Bed: Chapter 2 of 19

Looked at on Google Earth, the waste ground embraces two sides of our estate, which is an imperfect rhombus, and is made up of perhaps twice the land area occupied by Mountain View. If a football pitch is roughly one … Continue reading →

Labacally – The Witch’s Bed: Chapter 1 of 19

The two events that had our estate in the news headlines – that put it on the map, as it were – happened in quick succession of one another, which would imply a causality that very few people are aware … Continue reading →

The Valley of the Squinting Windows Helps Explain Irish Mother and Baby Homes Scandal

It’s pure coincidence that I was reading The Valley of the Squinting Windows (Brinsley MacNamara, 1918) the very week that the Irish Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation report has been published. The report’s revelations are shocking: 9,000 babies died in … Continue reading →

Hidden Fruit

During our summers in Zamora, the kids and I would go with their grandfather in the mornings to his orchard to pick whatever fruit had ripened overnight. There were a couple of fig trees, a couple of cherry trees, plum … Continue reading →