From The Wonders of Ireland by P. W. Joyce, 1911
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Eleven years after the occurrence last recorded viz., in the year 875, there was a great storm of wind and thunder all over Ireland, which ended in a shower of blood. After the shower had ceased, splashes and clots of blood were seen on the ground in various districts, especially at a place called Duma Dessa near Duleek in the County Meath, where all the houses and fields were thickly covered over.[1]
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[1] These two last wonders (12 and 13) were merely natural occurrences, like the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, magnified by the excited imagination of the people. Showers quite as wonderful as those recorded above have fallen in recent times. Some years ago a shower of little fishes fell near Merthyr Tydvil in Wales, and sprinkled the ground with sticklebacks for several square miles all round; and in India there have been showers of fishes as large as herrings which have generally reached the ground dead, but occasionally alive. These fishes must have been raised from the surface of the neighbouring seas or lakes by violent whirlwinds or waterspouts, carried to considerable distances through the air, and deposited on the ground when the force of the wind was spent. After the great storm of 6th Jan. 1889—the "Big Wind," as it was—and is still—called, herrings were found six miles inland on the western coast of Ireland.
Red coloured snow is quite common in the Arctic regions; and it falls annually in parts of the Alps. Showers of "blood" have also fallen in recent times; but what appears to be blood to the simple people, is really nothing but water coloured deep red with millions of little scarlet fungi, which, like the water containing fishes, is raised by whirlwinds and deposited in distant places. And snow becomes coloured from the same cause.
It is very well known that fungi of various kinds grow and disappear under favourable circumstances with extraordinary rapidity; and it sometimes happens that a green field, which in the evening has nothing remarkable in its appearance, is white all over with mushrooms in the morning. It needed only a sudden growth of minute scarlet fungi in Lough Leane to make the people believe that the lake was turned into blood, and that it remained so, till the fungi disappeared as suddenly as they came and left the water clear.
Truelove's Journal: A Bookshop Novella
From a sad, comfortless childhood Giles Truelove developed into a reclusive and uncommunicative man whose sole passion was books. For so long they were the only meaning to his existence. But when fate eventually intervened to have the outside world intrude upon his life, he began to discover emotions that he never knew he had.
This is a story for the genuine booklover, penned by an Irish bookseller under the pseudonym of Ralph St. John Featherstonehaugh.
Annals of the Famine in Ireland
Annals of the Famine in Ireland, by Asenath Nicholson, still has the power to shock and sadden even though the events described are ever-receding further into the past. When you read, for example, of the poor widowed mother who was caught trying to salvage a few potatoes from her landlord's field, and what the magistrate discovered in the pot in her cabin, you cannot help but be appalled and distressed.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger
This book, the prequel to Annals of the Famine in Ireland cannot be recommended highly enough to those interested in Irish social history. The author, Mrs Asenath Nicholson, travelled from her native America to assess the condition of the poor in Ireland during the mid 1840s. Refusing the luxury of hotels and first class travel, she stayed at a variety of lodging-houses, and even in the crude cabins of the very poorest. Not to be missed!
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Henry Ford Jones' book, first published in 1915 by Princeton University, is a classic in its field. It covers the history of the Scotch-Irish from the first settlement in Ulster to the American Revolutionary period and the foundation of the country.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
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