Claudia Kinmonth MRIA FSA

I love all those sideways (animal, human or anthropomorphic?) faces with twisty beards & enormous eyes...

Oh come back more people like Gloria Richardson

I've signed & passed it on to as many other people as I possibly could

I love that dynamic kitchen scene with the picture over the huge hearth of two bee skeps. Diners waiting through the distant door & someone rifling through a cupboard in the foreground ...

This is brilliant: education about caring for our environment is most effective when it starts with schoolchildren.

Huge congratulations to Prof Buckley!

Cone of shame..

Mosaic maker knew that swimming a horse bareback, needs a loose rein, good balance & a forward seat & water tends to sweep the rider back, like this shot of our redheaded son enjoying the same exhilarating thrill (after he'd learnt to swim...)!

I wonder what happened to that impressively enormous wooded area just below 'Lymryk'...?
What a brilliant map, with mole-hill style, neatly aligned mountains. So convenient to have Dublin a little closer to West Cork than it is now, too...

I especially admire the one (with initials EK beneath) including such an elaborately complex beautiful pattern. We have plenty of dot & circle marks here in Ireland, but the 9 conjoined symmetrically, is new to me. Thanks for sharing!

Placed, in my opinion anyway...apotropaic!

Well I hope you can wait patiently without dwelling on how it's perceived, and with joy at having reached this stage. I find it a great release - after pressing 'send' on a book!

Dead cat, bald in pouncing position in blue museum case with photo of General Ireton's building where the cat was found during demolition in the 1840s.

Newspaper cutting from 1848 Limerick Chronicle light-heartedly describing the discovery of the mummified cat.

The ritual concealment of dead cats in buildings, like foundation sacrifices, is well researched & documented. Some were mummified in pouncing positions with prey, like this..Limerick County Museum has the mummified 17thC 'Ireton cat' in a case. It's apotropaic in Australia, N. America, & Ireland...

That looks so freezing cold under its unthatched, thin tin roof. Deceptively beautiful but not in the least bit cosy & doubtless originally lacking running water & electricity.

I'm not sure which is worse around tiny children

It looks like they're eating a full blown picnic, or fish and chips with tea... I do wonder if anyone's preaching at the other end of the chapel!?

Best of luck focusing on the final details. What a great stage to have reached.

That's quite a dramatic memory! What a fright your poor little father clearly had. I like the anecdote of the tin basin on the double stretcher. Some tables had a ladder-like pair of stretchers: they're an idiosyncraticaly Irish design element of kitchen tables.

Presumably the two with identical dresses are sisters! What a lovely, lovely group, but the back story of moving overcrowded families out of Dublin into those tower blocks in Ballymun wasn't such fun at all...

Traditional vernacular kitchen tables frequently had long double stretchers underneath, sometimes mentioned as a place to lay out a corpse, or to place shoes or boots (which can be seen here) but it's rare to find photographic evidence.

I'm not exactly sure if its size or scale, and it's broken, but it's shape reminds me of 'witch stones' found in parts of Ulster (some have a hole in the centre).

Thanks for explaining, it's an unusual place to be wearing jewellery (other than an elaborate belt buckle), presumably it was important to her.

A really impressive hairstyle as well!

That's a spectacular looking dress, she was obviously an advanced accomplished, seamstress. I'm puzzled by the almost vertical straight feature on the front of her waistband, & wonder what it is?

Just saying, the coins are wonderfully decorated. The dot & circle motif occurs as recently as up to the early 20th century symbolucally on Irish vernacular furniture & is probably in that context apotropaic.

It's not working it keeps saying it's expired ...oh dear

Historically rural Irish people made milk from oats: they called it 'Bull's milk'! Soaking oats & straining it to make a milky drink was also taught to me by a frugal Kenyan friend. It's all delicious & needs no cow. Oatly's barista oat milk is absolutely the most delicious addition to coffee...

Ok thankyou. Then having achieved that is lidar a subsequent stage (& who in Ireland, handles that?)

Brilliant to see this release. I've previously seen the positive effect beavers have on the environment, in Vermont.

Those horses have intriguing bridles: what impressive detail!