A Social History of Rural Ireland in the 1950s

This book offers a brief history of Crotta Great House, County Kerry, Ireland, now in ruins, where Horatio Herbert Kitchener spent his boyhood years. These ruined walls, which rose out of the ashes of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, loom large throughout the author’s own childhood years; their crumbling remains both a monument to and an echo of the past.

Part memoir and part social history, it interweaves historical research with the author’s own personal memories to create an unsentimental snapshot of a moment in Ireland’s recent past embedded within a broader historical backdrop. The writing shifts seamlessly between the past and present tense to graphically portray experiences of growing up in the prevailing culture and conditions of the time—bringing to life the atmosphere of the 1950s and ‘60s in rural Ireland as seen through the eyes of a child.