County Meath
An Mhí
- IrishAn Mhí
- ProvinceLeinster
- County townNavan; Trim was the older county town
- Local governmentMeath County Council
- Area2,342 km²
- Population220,826 (2022)
- Highest pointSlieve na Calliagh, 276 m
The fifteen acre line
In 1900, 61.4 per cent of holdings in Meath were under thirty acres. That looks small farmed. It was not.
Meath was full of one and two acre plots held by labourers. Count at fifteen acres and Meath looks nearly as small farmed as Donegal.
Count at thirty and the West stands apart. The line you draw decides the answer.
Cormac Óg
Tara
On the fifteenth of August 1843 O'Connell held a monster meeting on the Hill of Tara. The nationalist press put the crowd at over a million.
It was not a million. The historian who went back to the figures reckons the press numbers could be cut by as much as three quarters. Even so, about a million and a half people went to one meeting or another that year.
One supporter who was at Tara remembered that the people cared little for the speeches. They could read them in the paper next day.
Cormac Óg
Francis Ledwidge
Born at Slane on the nineteenth of August 1887, the son of a farm labourer.
Lord Dunsany took him up, and through him he met Yeats, Gogarty and Thomas MacDonagh. By twenty five he was an established writer.
In October 1914 he joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, although he disagreed with Redmond's call to support the war. He served at Gallipoli and in Serbia. His Songs of the Fields reached him there.
On the thirty first of July 1917, the first day of the third battle of Ypres, he was killed by a shell while making a road. He is buried at Boezinge, near the Welsh poet Hedd Wyn, killed the same day.
Cormac Óg
Read further
The monster meeting at Tara in 1843 is the most famous crowd in Irish history and the least reliably counted.