Our January monthly meeting on Wednesday, 8th January at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library has beem camcelled as our soeaker has a significant distance to travel in what are expected to be poor weather conditions. We hope to rearrange the talk later in the year.

Our speaker will be Professor Keith Lilley of the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen’s University, Belfast.

An historical geographer with particular research expertise in interpreting historic landscapes, maps and built environments, he is currently involved in OS200–Digitally Re-Mapping Ireland’s Ordnance Survey Heritage, an all-island (UK-RoI) research collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast, University of Limerick and the Royal Irish Academy. He will be discussing the following topic:

Ordnance Survey @ 200: Local Heritage of Global Importance

2024 marked the bicentenary of the beginning of the Ordnance Survey (OS) in Ireland. In this highly-illustrated talk, Professor Keith Lilley explores the local impacts OS surveying and mapping had two hundred years ago, as well as the surveyors’ enduring legacies in our landscapes today. The evidence for the OS’s mapping work is all around us as ‘local heritage’, often hidden and neglected. And yet this local heritage is of global importance, for the OS in Ireland in the 1820s-30s played an important international role in developing globally the science of earth measurement (‘geodesy’), and Armagh’s contribution in this was key. 

I hope you will be able to attend.

Our next monthly meeting will take place on Wednesday, 13th November at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library.

Our speaker this month is Cormac Hamill.

Armagh-born Cormac is a former teacher and broadcaster, who has presented numerous TV series on BBC and TG4, all with a strong connection to the Outdoors. He was a founder member of the Cave Hill Conservation Campaign in 1989 and has been its Chair since 2006.

He will be discussing The geology, archaeology, history and environment of Cave Hill.

Our next monthly meeting will take place on Wednesday, 9th October at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library.

Our speaker this month is Lisa White.

Lisa specialises in in Human Osteoarchaeology and funerary rites and is currently undertaking a PhD at Queens University Belfast, investigating funerary rites in Middle to Late Neolithic Ireland. 

She recently undertook a placement at Armagh County Museum reviewing and cataloguing their human remains collections. Her talk is entitled: Grave Matters: the secrets held in ancient bones andshe will be discussing her research, what information can be gleaned from ancient human remains, and the role of Museums in facilitating this type of research.

We are starting our autumn series of meetings earlier this year. Our September meeting will take place on Wednesday, 4th September at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library.

Our speaker this month is Dr Edward Burke, who will discuss:

Ulster’s Lost Counties – loyalism after partition in 1920 in Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan and its effect on Northern Ireland

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the University of St Andrews, Edward Burke is an Assistant Professor in the History of War since 1945 at University College Dublin (UCD). He is currently the Director of the International War Studies MA programme and Director of Graduate Teaching at the School of History. Prior to joining UCD, he was an Assistant/Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Nottingham (2017-2022). His research interests are principally in military cohesion, paramilitarism and political violence. In 2020 he was awarded a two-year UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Leadership Fellowship on paramilitary violence in rural Ulster since 1920. He is the author of An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland, 1971-1972 (Liverpool University Press, 2018) and Ulster’s Lost Counties: Loyalism and Paramilitarism since 1920 (Cambridge university Press, 2024) and the forthcoming Ghosts of a Family : Ireland’s Most Infamous Unsolved Murder, the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Modern Troubles (Merrion Press, September 2024)

Our last meeting of the season will take place on Wednesday, 12th June. We will be getting a guided tour of St Patrick’s Church of Ireland, Clonfeacle in Benburb.

We will meet at the church around 7:00 pm and the tour will be starting at 7:15pm. There is a car park at the Church, with more parking space available at the Priory. You will find a map of Benburb at the bottom of this post. The cost of the visit will be covered by the Group’s funds so there is no additional cost on the night.

Our next monthly meeting will be take place on Wednesday 8th May at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library.

Our speaker this month is Dr Leanne McCormick, Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish Social History and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) at Ulster University. Her research interests include women’s history, history of sexuality and history of medicine in Ireland/Northern Ireland and she has published widely in these areas. With Dr Elaine Farrell (QUB), she has been working on the AHRC funded project ‘Bad Bridget: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918’. They have produced a five part podcast series on the project, an exhibition at the National Museums NI, Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh and an Irish Times #1 bestselling book, Bad Bridget: Crime, mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women. This will be the topic of our talk. You will find more details about the project at Bad Bridget – Ulster University and below.

Our next monthly meeting will take place on Wednesday, 13th March at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library. Our speaker this month is Antaine Ó Donnaile, who will be discussing Séamus Mac Murphy 1720-1750: An Armagh Outlaw.

Antaine is director of Armagh-based production company Macha Media, which released the award-winning Irish language programme Séamus Mac Murchaidh – Díolta Faoina Luach about the famous South Armagh ‘rapparee’ in 2023.

Our monthly meeting will take place on Wednesday, 14th February at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library and Matthew McMahon will be discussing “A Planetarium for Armagh – a 25 year journey“.

Starting with Dr Eric Mervyn Lindsay’s ambitious plan to create a memorial to the service men of the United States who were stationed in Northern Ireland in 1943, and moving through the twenty five year long journey that saw many false starts and massive changes in the technology of planetaria, this talk will examine how a familiar community fixture came to exist, and the forgotten characters who made it possible. It will draw upon original letters, minutes and notes made by the parties involved on four continents over a period of thirty years.