I drove through Maam Cross yesterday thinking of this photo
Woman smoking a pipe in front of a turf fire
Interior of house of M. [Micheál] Breathnach
Maam Cross [Roads], Co. Galway
1935
Caoimhín Ó Danachairhttps://t.co/8kLwjiPZDJ @duchas_ie CC BY-NC 4.0#DeOldify #Photoshop pic.twitter.com/2EFMRzeXfT— Old Ireland in Colour (@irelandincolour) July 20, 2020
Hitting the clay.
Her tí, her rules.
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Did she have to resort to smoking tea leaves?
She’s bean-an-tí, why shouldn’t she smoke what she twinkle-pants well wants?
Though if this were 1935, Broadsheet would moderate that twinkle-pants into a sparkle-britches.
Are you one of the lucky few who never had Peig drilled into them? There was a whole chapter about her running out of the oul baccy and going mad for a drag, ending up drying out the tea leaves from the pot and smoking them.
My teacher thought this was a hoot. We did not.
I feel like I missed out on Peig , is it worth a read now ?
I am so traumatised, I really am not the person to ask. That being said, it is a good insight into the life of those times.
If you want to know about life on the Blaskets, though, I can recommend Maurice Óg Ó Súilleabháin’s Fifty Years a-Growing (Fiche Bliain ag Fás, but I read it in English). He was a contemporary(ish) of Peigs, and without the lash of the Leaving Cert hanging over me, I found it much more readable.
I’ll add it to my list , cheers
D’Oh! Twenty Years a-Growing. Got caught up in the phonetics of fiche.
You can’t just read it yourself, it has to be read to you on beautiful spring afternoons in a monotonous drawl and interspersed with lectures on how good young people have it nowadays by a tobacco-stinking hack of a muinteoir with one eye on the cane.
…you’re hired!
That could be 1735, except we have photos then. How quickly Ireland has changed. She has amazing eyes.
Irish people’s eyes are their best quality, often large and an interesting shade of blue
That’s beautiful.
…fifty years after that photo was taken the same scene could have been displayed in my county and I’m sure, every county…
Love this, super colours.
She has a great shade of blue alright but you wander around those parts and they’re mostly the darkest brown, often (but mistakenly) attributed the the genes of shipwrecked Spanish sailors trading with Galway of which there were many, hence the Spanish arch and the “lynching” of Lynch’s son for the killing of a Spanish Prince over a woman in the city
and interestingly passed through the male line is the blue eyes and darker skin tones of the original hunter gathers and elite Neolithic, brown eyes and fairer skin introduced later along with agriculture, it’s a fairly new discovery as previously blue eyes were thought to come later with agriculture but actually precede it.
Well it’s certainly new to me :-)