In 1783, Carl Gottlob Küttner (1755-1805) travelled via Holyhead to Dublin for his new post as house teacher and travel companion in the household of George Beresford (1735–1800), the second Earl of Tyrone. Originally from the Electorate of Saxony,…

Arklow Harbour in county Wicklow on the east coast of Ireland was founded in the ninth century after the Danish Vikings had landed. The Irish name for this town is Inbhear Mór which translates to wide or large estuary. A distinct feature of this…

Seventy years ago, a young woman from Lismore County Waterford set out with her bicycle on her first trip out of Ireland alone. The trip would take her to England, a ‘Pagan land’ something that did not go unnoticed by her neighbours some of whom…

When Mary Wollstonecraft crossed from Holyhead to Dublin – ‘the best and shortest passage’, she noted – in October 1786, she was lucky. ‘[T]he weather was fine the prospects delightful’, she wrote in a letter to Eliza Bishop, looking back on the…