Welcome to History Shorts!

"History never looks like history when you are living through it." John W Gardner, a United States Education secretary.

This blog shares little slices of local and landscape history from Ireland and Britain...

"I knew when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see." Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain.

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Victorian post boxes

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Familiar, but not mundane They are among our most familiar items of street furniture; indeed there are more than 115,000 throughout the UK. Yet how many of us walk past a post box without considering how long it might have been there? Letter boxes have been a feature of our streets since the 1850s, when demand for postal services grew following the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840. The novelist Anthony Trollope is remembered as the Post Office official responsible for recommending the introduction of pillar boxes to allow for easier posting of private letters. These were first installed on the Channel Islands in 1852, and were introduced to the mainland the following year. Wall boxes started to appear a few years later. Early boxes were green, but red had become the standard colour by 1879. Scroll down for a selection of boxes, of both the pillar and wall variety, from the Victorian era, all bearing the VR (Victoria Regina) cipher. One of this selection is green, though not b...
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Meeting the Tandragee Idol

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My first encounter with the Tandragee stone idol was with a replica in the Ulster Museum in Belfast. Replica in Ulster Museum (author's photo, all rights reserved) This curious little figure probably caught my eye because of its name, Tandragee being the village best known as the Northern Irish home of Tayto potato crisps. Peering at the figure a little more closely it seemed to be clutching its left arm (so I thought) with what looked like a smile, sitting beside another stone figure of a bear-like animal. I was astonished to discover that the original Tandragee idol wasn’t in another museum but had a much more unlikely home. Beneath a plaque commemorating a late 19th century archbishop of Ireland, worshippers and visitors to St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral in Armagh can see the Tandragee idol in all its glory sitting on a low stone plinth in a side aisle. The cathedral houses other pre-Christian idols in its crypt (judging by photos on Flickr, these have also been on dis...
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Mapping Belfast's hidden river Farset

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The Farset is the now mostly underground river that is said to give Belfast its name*. There has been talk of 'daylighting' the river in places, ie uncovering it from its culverted fate to flow openly again. This could boost nature and air quality and also potentially alleviate flood risk. Belfast's underground rivers have been linked to some of the flooding experienced by the city. Most articles about the Farset focus on the stretch from High Street to the Lagan. While it's not universally known that a river of some importance in the city's development once flowed here, I'm betting a fair few High Street shoppers know of its existence underfoot. But on the Google Map below I've expanded outwards to try to map some of the Farset's known locations along its whole course, while guessing at a few more. " The lost river that gave Belfast its name " is an interesting 2013 article from the Belfast Telegraph  which has provided the basis for many ...
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