Christmas rather interrupted our regular-ish weekly posts, but we've got a lot of really interesting historical content to post today. We'd also like to wish all our friends and supporters a very Happy New Year, and keeping our fingers crossed that we can have a real, live Festival in 2021.
21 December marked the Winter Solstice and Abarta Heritage has a three-episode series on their website looking at Newgrange, famously aligned on that solstice. They feature three people who know the monument very well - Professor Muiris O’Sullivan and Dr. Jessica Smyth, both from UCD, and Clare Tuffy, who manages the visitor centre at Brú na Bóinne. Festival co-founder Victoria Kingston worked with all three to develop the new exhibition at Brú na Bóinne which opened earlier in 2020 and interprets Newgrange and the many other Neolithic sites in the area. The Discovery Programme also shared some wonderful 3-D models of the mound, passage, chamber & art at Newgrange.
Ghost stories are traditionally told at Christmas, and MOLI (the Museum of Literature Ireland) has a wonderfully spooky short story on their website - Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘The Familiar’. It was originally published in 1847 as ‘The Watcher’ but set in late 18th century Dublin.
A wonderful online exhibition from the Crawford Art Gallery - Harry Clarke: Marginalia - which looks at his watercolour studies for The Eve of St Agnes window, now in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.
A new blog called Belfast Between the Wars, written by Victoria Millar who is a senior curator at National Museums of Northern Ireland, features stories she has uncovered from the city's newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s. The first one is great: "Ballymena Lady's plight in closed Belfast premises...."
We've just discovered a podcast called Irish Stew - "the podcast for the Global Irish Nation... whether hyphenated or not" which featured this interview with historian and archaeologist Damian Shiels (whose work on the Irish in the American Civil War we have featured frequently on this blog), including Damian's work on battlefield archaeology.
The UK Parliamentary Archives have put together this short film on the significance and legacy of the Government of Ireland Act, passed in December 1920.
And finally the RTE website featured a fascinating interactive map on different ways the Irish border could have been drawn.
