For the present I have said enough to indicate that when my father and mother married there came together two very widely remote traditions — English and Puritan and mechanic on the one hand, Gaelic and Catholic and Peasant on the other: freedom loving both, and neither without its strain of poetry and its experience of spiritual and other adventure. And these two traditions worked in me and fused together by a certain fire proper to myself, … made me the strange thing I am.

Little has been published in relation to the process of turf-cutting in Ireland. Most contributions to scholarship on the subject have been general in nature and although there are many rich, but yet uncharted, accounts in the vast collections of the Irish Folklore Commission, published specific accounts of local tradition are extremely rare. This paper sets out to give a detailed account of the process of sleán turf in one small area of North Cork. It is based on personal practical experience and on interviews with elderly local inhabitants, some of whom have over seventy years experience working in the bog. It seeks to demonstrate that, as with any aspect of folk life, far from being a generic process, which is variously replicated around the country, turf-cutting has its own distinct local character and alters with weather conditions and with other factors. The documentation of this detail is in itself of value, and it is hoped in time it will contribute to future comparative studies.

In 1998 the Ulster Museum's exhibition, ‘Up in Arms! The 1798 Rebellion in Ireland’, commemorated the bicentenary of the 1798 Rebellion, an event which saw the birth of both constitutional nationalism and the concept of the armed struggle in Ireland. The hostilities of 1798 bore all the hallmarks of a civil war, with an estimated 30,000 dead and up to 5,000 transported or exiled. It left long memories in the Nationalist community and something akin to a cultural amnesia among the Unionists (even though the United Irishmen who led the rebellion were originally largely Protestants). The failure of the rebellion led directly to the Act of Union of 1800, the raison d' être of0 the Unionist community. The political and social unrest of the years prior to the outbreak of rebellion in 1798 had seen the formation of the Orange Order, the staunchly Protestant society whose processions, seen as colourful by the Protestant community and as intimidating by the Catholic community lie at the heart of the current post-conflict tensions.

William George Simmonds, who was born in Constantinople in 1876 and died in rural Gloucestershire in 1968, has left two legacies by which he is known today, sculpting and puppetry (Fig. I). While he excelled in both, this article is concerned with his puppet speciality, marionettes. These were used to enact a repertoire of plays and occasionally covered a range of characters (Table I). Some appear to have been a regular feature of the short plays that were performed recurrently throughout the twenty-year span of his professional career. These were the The Circus, Harlequinade, and, most celebrated of all, The Woodland with its cast of forest creatures, nymphs and fauns. All these plays portrayed the same world of whimsical fantasy. Puppet historians have claimed Simmonds as one of the pioneers in the Twentieth-Century puppet theatre revival. However, to his marionettes as a mere imaginative resurrection of an entertainment form is to do them less than justice. These puppets are far better understood in the context of the contemporary Arts and Crafts Movement.

" From Corrib to Cultra. Folklife Essays in Honour of Alan Gailey." Folk Life, 41(1), pp. 133–135