County Kerry, just pics and a poem.

Header picture, Connemara Farm is an oil painting by Elizabeth Ryan

"A Kerry footballer with an inferiority complex is one who thinks he's just as good as everybody else."
John B. Keane

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
Flannery O'Connor

"You know it's summer in Ireland when the rain gets warmer."
Hal Roach










I discovered the artist Alan Cotton while leafing through a Country Life magazine in the library and was delighted to see a print of a picture of County Kerry - The High Road from the Bay, oil on canvas. That one is not on here but I have found some of his Irish paintings on his website and just had to share them, they are so beatiful.

To continue the Kerry theme, here is a poem by the late Sigerson Clifford, who was born in County Cork of Kerry parents.

The Tinkerman's Daughter

The wee birds were lining the bleak autumn branches

• Waiting to fly to a far sunny shore
  When the tinkers made camp at a bend on the river
  Coming back from the horse-fair in Ballinasloe
  The harvest being over the farmer came walking
  Along the Feale River that bordered his land
  'Twas there he first saw her 'twixt firelight and water
  The tinkerman's daughter, the red-headed Ann

  Next morning he woke from a night without resting
  He went to her father, he made his claim known
  In a pub in Listowel they worked out a bargain
  For the tinker a pony, for the daughter a home
  Where the trees shed their shadows along the Feale River
  The tinker and the farmer inspected the land
  And a white gelding pony was the price they agreed on
  For the tinkerman's daughter, the red-headed Ann

  With the wedding soon over the tinkers departed
  They're eager to travel on south down the road
  The crunch of their iron-shod wheels on the gravel
  Was as bitter to her as the way she'd been sold
  She tried hard to please him, she did all his bidding
  She slept in his bed and she worked on the land
  But the walls of that cabin pressed tighter and tighter
  On the tinkerman's daughter, the red-headed Ann

  White as the hands of the priest or the hangman
  The snow spread its blanket the next Christmas round
  The tinkerman's daughter slipped out of his bedside
  Turned her back on the land and her face to the town
  It's said someone saw her at dusk that same evening
  As she made her way out o'er Likelycompane
  And that was the last time the settled folk saw her
  The tinkerman's daughter, the red-headed Ann

  Where the North Kerry hills cup the Feale o'er Listowel
  At a farm on its banks lives a bitter old man
  He swears by the shotgun he keeps at his bedside
  He'll kill any tinker that camps on his land
  Whenever he hears iron-shod wheels on gravel
  Or a horse in the shafts of a bright caravan
  Then his day's work's tormented, his night sleep's demented
  By the tinkerman's daughter, the red-headed Ann

• Sigerson Clifford

Bye for now,
Cait