All posts by Richard

February Meeting

Our next monthly meeting will take place on Wednesday, 12th February at 6:30pm in Armagh County Museum (in the ground floor reading room, kindly made available by the Natural History and Philosophical Society). Our Annual General Meeting will take place first, starting at 6:30pm, followed by the talk at 7:00 pm.

Our speaker this month will be archaeologist Paul Logue, who specialises in Gaelic society, conflict and identity in Ireland c.1200-1650 and has published widely on those topics since the early 1990s. He will be discussing:

Richard Bartlett and the Lost Castle of Armagh

English military cartographer Richard Bartlett’s 1602 image of Armagh is normally taken to indicate a deserted town on the eve of capture by the crown’s Lord Deputy Mountjoy. Previous descriptions of it stress an unoccupied town in ruins save for a small secular community in thatched wicker cabins. In addition, various layers of deeper meaning have been put upon the image linking it with contemporary English messages of a failed Gaelic order and the supposed advance of civilisation into Ulster. This talk re-examines the image highlighting previously missed aspects, reinterpreting the message, and also identifying the site of ‘the lost castle of Armagh’ brought back to the light by Kevin Quinn.    

January Meeting Camcelled

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.

History Armagh Vol.5, No.4 2025

The Armagh & District History Group produces a magazine “History Armagh” each year.  The latest copy of the magazine will be available in local shops and other outlets following its lauunch on Thursday, 12th December just in time for a last minute stocking filler..

The magazine is free to members and costs £4.50 to non-members.  It will be available in the following local outlets: Armagh County Museum, The Mall; Charlemont Hotel, Cultural Heritage Services Library, 1 Markethill Road, Armagh; Emerson’s Supermarket; Macaris Newsagents; McAnerny’s Supermarket; Navan Centre; O’Kane’s Supermarket; Red Neds Bar; Rocks, Thomas Street; Royal Irish Fusiliers Museum, The Mall; Whittle’s Supermarket, Newry Road.

If you live at a distance from Armagh postage can be arranged by contacting: magazine@history-armagh.org

Some sample articles from the early magazines can be found here.

Some pdf copies of earlier magazines can be found here.

December Meeting

Our next monthly meeting will take place on Thursday 12th December at 7:00 pm in Armagh County Museum, when we will be launching the new issue of the new History Armagh magazine.

Members will be able to collect their free copy of the magazine on the night. If you are unable to come and collect it then, members’ copies will be available to collect from the Museum shop from the following day.

November Meeting

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.

October Meeting

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.

September Meeting

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)

June Meeting