Moneymore is a village of some 1900 people, situated in County Londonderry. The plantation village was built by the Drapers’ Company of London, who also had land in nearby Draperstown (hence the name ‘Draperstown’). The word Moneymore comes from the Irish ‘Muine Mór’ and means a large thicket or large hill. A century ago, four to five hundred people lived there. My...
A Moment in Time My parents, Richard Mulholland and Eleanor Quinn, got married in the summer of 1961. After the wedding at First Moneymore, the wedding party drove the 34 miles northwards for the wedding reception on the coast. They stopped at the Rose Gardens in Coleraine for photographs. Afterwards they made the short trip to the reception in the Carrig-na-Cule Hotel in Portstewart. It was...
Here’s a photo from the late 1960’s. After cleaning the image up a tad, mum’s handwritten comment from below the original photograph in her scrapbook was re-inserted. On the left, Aunt May (i.e. my mother’s aunt), then comes my mum’s father (William Neely Quinn), mum, then her mother, then her husband (Richard Mulholland). Aunt May never married. We would visit...
Here is a photograph of my mother, Eleanor Quinn, in a corn field in the late 1950s. This was taken on the family farm at Carrydarragh, just outside Moneymore. Corn fields were just a little before my time. I do recall the old reapers, some still functional – laying around in the barn – and have some very vague memories of sheaves of corn in a few fields. Fields of Gold There were...