If you type Elizabeth Countess of Fingal into Google you may not get the above but rather the first Elizabeth (1604-1630) who was said to be the daughter of Rory Ó Donnell then Earl of Tyrconnel and whose mother was given as Lady Margaret Fitzgerald, daughter of the Earl of Kildare. And maybe that sets the scene, All of the great families, both Norman and Irish were interconnected in many ways and Elizabeth Burke of Moycullen County Galway, who married Arthur Plunkett the 11th Earl of Fingal when she was only seventeen, would chronicle the end of an age. A friend of just about everyone from King to Nationalist leaders her writing of childhood days on her father's estate is often magical. She was a founder member and first President of what is now the Irish Countrywomen's Association and second President of the Camogie Association, a game she described somewhere as a gentler form for the girls, but maybe not in those exact words. She described the 1914 season as, "the gayest and most magnificent London had ever seen. To me there was something terrible about it. I felt it at the time". The gun running episode into Howth, also, where she describes Mrs Erskine Childers and Mary Rice Spring, looking charming in yachting clothes and its aftermath on Batchelor's Walk where three people died, "those three deaths in Ireland, and the assassination of the Austrian Arch-Duke, lit a torch that set fire to Europe". The books ends in the Autumn of 1923, where she waits all night in the study at Killeen for the burners to come, but they didn't, and Killeen survived, for a while. Today it is a golf course and the castle is no longer visible from the road. The history of those castles and the families that surrounded them shaped not just Ireland but the modern world. Published first in 1937 by Collins, the above is by the Lilliput Press and available on Amazon. Recommended!
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