From A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 1837
The level portions of the county form part of the great field of floetz limestone. Its structure varies from the perfectly compact to the conjointly compact and foliated, and even granularly foliated. Beds of the last kind are quarried and wrought for various purposes near Tullamore; the stone is of a greyish white and of a large granular texture. The Slieve Bloom mountains consist of a nucleus of clay-slate surrounded by sandstone. The sandstone appears to sweep round the clay-stone nucleus, following the sinuosities and curvatures formed by its surface, with a dip that conforms to the declivity. Quarries are formed all round the mountains, in some of which the strata are from one to three feet in thickness; while in others excellent flags are raised from an inch to four or five inches thick, and seven and eight feet square. The sandstone of these mountains is commonly yellowish-white or grey, sometimes exhibiting small porous interstices filled with iron ochre. Croghan hill is a protruding mass of basalt, supporting on its north-western and south-western sides the floetz limestone. The gravel hills or escars form a very singular feature in this county. They appear in the borders of Westmeath and proceed by Philipstown in a south-western direction to Roscrea. They are entirely composed of gravel and sand, those in the northern part being of silicious formation and in the southern argillaceous. In no other part of Ireland do they present so great a variety of structure or exhibit a more bold and marked appearance. Neither coal nor any other of the more valuable metallic ores has been found; those discovered being manganese and iron in very small quantities, with some ochre and potters' clay.
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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.
A story for the genuine booklover, penned by an Irish bookseller under the pseudonym of Ralph St. John Featherstonehaugh.
FREE download 23rd - 27th May
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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