I’m in Ireland, walking the ground my Coughlan, Devery, Sheridan and Hannigan people walked. These are my field notes, day by day: the records, the graveyards, the people I meet along the way, and the rain gear that gave up on day two.
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Day One: Heathrow to Athlone, and the Brennan Side of the River
First day of my Ireland trip: a piano busker at Heathrow, a mooch round Athlone’s castle and churches, and the town Thomas Brennan left in 1841 with his new wife…
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Day 2, Part 1: The Farm Drive-By
Before the graveyards, before the bus, before any of it: the farm. I gave Ankit the postcode (that’s what we’d call it in the UK; here it’s an Eircode, and…
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Day 2, Part 2: “People Usually Only Spend Fifteen Minutes There”
Day two was the day it all got real. On Day 1 I arrived in Athlone by train, in the rain, and discovered within about four minutes that my rain…
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Day 3, Part 1: All the Lies About the Area: The Bus to Clonmacnoise
A quick note on the photo up top: those five headstones standing upright in a line are almost all Deverys. Devery is my 3rd great-grandmother’s surname. The day started the…
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Day 3, Part 2: Three Hours on My Knees with the Coughlans
The sun from the day before had packed up and gone home. Clonmacnoise was back to its usual self: overcast, drizzly, and the kind of damp that gets into the…