For further details and information on how to purchase please click here.
Details of LAUNCH
Links to other websites:
When
Turkeys chewed TobaccoMemories from south-west Ulster
by George Sheridan
|
|
For further details and information on how to purchase please click here. Details of LAUNCH |
Links to other websites:
|
" The ceiliers came at night and sat round our fire and told stories starting with 'Once upon a time! when houses were thatched with pot-sticks and 'when turkeys chewed tobacco.'
Well, when you heard a story starting with those words you were ready to believe anything that came later, especially when you were a wee lad of five years old."This book has been compiled from George Sheridan's speech and writing. He made many contributions to museums and folklore archives on both sides of the border and was one of the contributors to BBC Northern Ireland's series The lives of our times, made specially to mark the millennium.
This book is an important contribution to the history of the Florencecourt, Killesher, and Blacklion areas of Fermanagh and north-west Cavan. Even more, it combines local history with much social observation of how people lived on the border in the difficult times of partition, on De Valera's 'economic war' of the 1930s, and Eddie Cooney's evangelical preaching at Enniskillen Fair. Added to this are international folk-tales which were told and retold around the quiet hearths of rural Ulster. The personality of its observant and kindly author allows the reader to make human contact with the environment which formed him, from his childhood encounter with 'Biddy the Hat' to his final elegies for values that are gone.
The attractively produced book has been compiled and edited by the author's stepson David Wilson and historian Brian Turner, with a foreword by Jack Johnston, chairman of the Ulster Local History Trust.
'This is a life story, a celebration, and a local history which includes international tales. It comes from a man whose place was in two mountain townlands on either side of an Irish border.'