WEST, Mrs. Frederic. A Summer Visit to Ireland in 1846. Illu...

Hammer

€440

WEST, Mrs. Frederic. A Summer Visit to Ireland in 1846. Illustrated with aquatints and woodcuts. London: Bentley, 1847. 8vo. Publisher's cloth. Professional paper restoration to a few margins where there were faint traces of old worming. Good copy. Rare. Teresa Cornwallis West was interested in the ordinary people, landscape, antiquities, folklore, agriculture, politics, the effects of the famine on the poor and the relief work. The author states that the purpose of her visit to Ireland during the Irish famine was "The public sympathies are at last awakened towards Ireland. My object in travelling through it was to satisfy myself of its actual condition ... and to exhort my English countrymen to go and do likewise". During her three week visit, partly conducted by rail, she visits Wicklow, Carlow, Kilkenny, Tipperary, Cork, and Limerick, returning via Offaly and Kildare: "I was glad to leave behind the poverty and sharp-facedness of Tipperary, and enter County Cork. However, the scenery was bleak enough passing the Kilworth Hills. Fermoy, on the Blackwater, is the nicest and cleanest town in the country ... ." She shows a favourable disposition towards the native Irish, gives a detailed description of the national schools, comments freely on hotels and quotes extensively from Duffy's 'Ballad Poetry of Ireland', also with references to Bartlett, Hall, Petrie and Moore. At Bray she notices potatoes "beginning to fail." She travelled with her husband and they stayed at Shanganagh Castle, the seat of Sir George Cockburn and at Lough Fea the seat of John Shirley. "Ardee is a neat town. We stopped and changed horses at the Shirley Arms, near the tower of an old castle which projects into the street. When Edward Bruce landed in Antrim, in the spring of 1315, with his Scottish followers, they savagely burned the Church of the Carmelite Friary here, filled with women and children, who had taken refuge within its walls."