Buck Whaley
Buck Whaley

Author: David Ryan

Publisher: Merrion Press

Published: 2019-01-04

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1785372319

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Thomas 'Buck' Whaley was one of the greatest adventurers in Irish history. In 1788 he made an extraordinary 10-month journey from Dublin to Jerusalem for a wager of £15,000, equivalent to several million today. Nearly shipwrecked in the Sea of Crete, he almost died of plague in Constantinople, narrowly avoided a pirate attack, was waylaid by bandits, and met an infamous Ottoman governor known as 'the Butcher'. On his return, he became an overnight celebrity before suffering a catastrophic series of gambling losses that exiled him first to continental Europe (where he attempted to rescue Louis XVI from the guillotine) and then to the Isle of Man. When he died aged 34 in 1800 he had squandered an astronomical £400,000 (around 100 million) 'without ever purchasing or acquiring contentment or one hour's true happiness'. In his lifetime, Ireland was about to erupt in rebellion; France was on the brink of bloody revolution; and the Ottoman Empire was creaking at the seams. Whaley lit up this volatile world like a fast-burning candle but retained his ability to recognise the absurdity of his own actions and the world around him. Buck Whaley tells the full story of his remarkable life and adventures for the first time.

The Prehistoric Burial Sites of Northern Ireland
The Prehistoric Burial Sites of Northern Ireland

Author: Harry Welsh

Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd

Published: 2014-07-28

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 1784910074

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Much has been written about the history of Northern Ireland, but less well-known is its wealth of prehistoric sites, particularly burial sites, from which most of our knowledge of the early inhabitants of this country has been obtained.

Ballynahatty
Ballynahatty

Author: Barrie Hartwell

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 178925972X

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Just six miles from the center of Belfast, County Down, on the plateau of Ballynahatty above the River Lagan, is one of Ireland’s great Neolithic henge monuments: the 200 m wide Giant’s Ring. For over a thousand years, this area was the focus of intense funerary ritual seemingly designed to send the dead to their ancestors and secure the land for the living. Scattered through the fields to the north and west of the Ring are flat cemeteries, standing stones, tombs, cists, and ring barrows – ancient monuments that were leveled by the plough when the land was enclosed in the 18th and 19th centuries. A great 90 m long timber enclosure with an elaborate entrance and inner ‘temple’ was first observed through crop marks in aerial photos. Excavation of the site between 1990–1999 revealed a complex structure composed of over 400 postholes, many over 2 m deep. This was a building in the grand style, elegantly designed to control space, views, and access to an inner sanctum containing a platform for exposure of the dead. By 2550 BC, the timber ‘temple’ had been swept away in a massive conflagration and the remains dismantled. Ballynahatty was one of the last great public ceremonial enterprises known to have been constructed by the Neolithic farmers in Northern Ireland, an enterprise proclaiming their enigmatic religion, ancestral rights and territorial aspirations. This report reconstructs the remarkable building complex and explains the sophistication and organization of its construction and use. The report sets the site and excavation in the wider development of the Ballynahatty landscape and its study to the present day.

Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast
Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast

Author: Sean Farrell

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2023-10-15

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0815656963

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In Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast, Farrell analyzes the career of “political parson” Thomas Drew (1800-70), creator of one of the largest Church of Ireland congregations on the island and leading figure in the Loyal Orange Order. Farrell demonstrates how Drew’s success stemmed from an adaptive combination of his fierce anti-Catholicism and populist Protestant politics, the creation of social and spiritual outreach programs that placed Christ Church at the center of west Belfast life, and the rapid growth of the northern capital. At its core, the book highlights the synthetic nature of Drew’s appeal to a vital cross-class community of Belfast Protestant men and women, a fact that underlines both the success of his ministry and the long-term durability of sectarian lines of division in the city and province. The dynamics Farrell discusses were also not confined to Ireland, and one of the book’s central features is the close attention paid to the ways that developments in Belfast were linked to broader Atlantic and imperial contexts. Based on a wide array of new and underutilized archival sources, Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast is the first detailed examination of not only Thomas Drew, but also the relationships between anti-Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, and populist politics in early Victorian Belfast.