Talked to some more local people today about the project. Mattie Shannon is a nephew of Maudie, the old lady who used to live at the crossroads at the bottom of the hill. I asked him about photos but he seemed to think there were no surviving photographs of her. He told me to call back next week and he’d do a bit of research in the meantime.
After that I popped round to see Mikey Carthy (who’s 80 and has lived here all his life). Mikey wasn’t in and had some tough looking guard cats on patrol outside the cottage. Further down the road I bumped into Pat Woods, a local farmer, and he was happy to talk about the project. He seemed to know a lot about the families who lived around here. “There’s not much to say about Maudey and Tadey,” he said, “apart from the fact that they lived in those cottages”. As for pictures, he reckoned that “families didn’t take photographs of themselves in those days. You hired people to do that.” He suggested Buddy Flangan in Doolin might have some old prints. It does seem that the more I dig for these old people, the more they disappear from view.
Finally I visited John Casey, an auctioneer in Lisdoonvarna, who used to be good friends with Brud Petty and who said he had both photos and VHS records of Brud.