The Heritage Centre opened on 26 March 2016 with a new display, an important talk and an historic visit.
The 2016 Special exhibition at the museum isThe Last Post: Remembering World War One on the Island of Lismore (Exhibition for a worked-based dissertation project with the Lismore Gaelic Heritage Centre) designed by Jana Flieshart, postgraduate student at the University of Stirling.
This following poem is by Pauline Isabel Dowling .“I wrote this poem after many years of standing straight backed at remembrance services while silently remembering the forgotten, the never mentioned, the always unsung. I wanted to make them visible in the only way I knew.
Remembrance Sunday 2010
I remember the mothers
The sisters, the wives, the daughters
And……oh yes…
The girlfriends.
Certainly the girlfriends
left alone with no claim
(not even the same name)
I remember their deserts of waiting
Their oceans of wondering if,
When the bloody tide runs out
Their love will cradle
Pale bleached bones
Crumbling to dust
I know their hearts were ripped out
And taken to the front
Their lives frozen.
I know they gestured days away – being brave
I know they knew that without
blood, scars, screaming corpses
chests of medals and memorials
their suffering was nothing
And such suffering is only ever
Unsung
I lay my wreaths
Shed my tears
Sing my hymns
For this other battlefield
Where silence rewards the loyalty
Where nothing records the humanity
keeping homes…..towns…cities sane
Until the butchery peters out
As it always does,
Until the screaming dies with
No more appetite to throw
Young lives on the pyre of hatred,
Until those still breathing turn for home
Knowing love will be waiting
I remember the spoils
The ranks of those raped
with a savagery reserved for
Female flesh punished as the enemy
Women and children made
HIV positive denied drugs…cast out…reviled
Worse than Unsung
Blamed
They count… they certainly count
Though their medal is shame
And their reward death
I sing of them
I remember
I remember women laying wreaths or
Polishing stones in Northern France
Old women who’d waited in vain
For lovers to fill them with laughter
Their wombs with life
I remember the armies of unloved women everywhere
Their aging beauty the butt of jokes
Girlfriend
Made spinster
Made teacher
Not even a widow.
I sing too of the wars in our streets
our homes… our hearts.
I wear my poppy for them all
I stand in church and listen
To the silence
as those that count are remembered
My straight back bearing witness,
To the never mentioned,
the always forgotten
the forever unsung
I remember them all.
PD
11 November 2016
The medieval castles of Lismore and the archaeology of lime
On the opening day – 26 March 2016 – Mark Thacker of the University of Edinburgh gave a talk on his work to date the building of Achinduin and Coeffin Castles. This is one of a series being presented by The Scottish Medieval Castles & Chapels C-14 Project (SMCCCP). It is part of a three-year Historic Environment Scotland funded research project to re-analyse the construction of medieval buildings across the whole country – and to date them archaeologically. That the Castles of Lismore were included within the first year of this latest project is no coincidence. The extraordinary geology of the island and its important place in the later lime burning history of the region are well known, but this presentation explored an earlier period when communities all over the world succeeded in manufacturing masonry buildings in very different ways. It is a fresh look at a number of important Scottish buildings, particularly in the west Highlands and islands, and including the castles of Lismore.
Castle Coeffin by Mark Thacker 2016
Carmichael family Bible
Fiona Mackay and twenty other descendants of Hugh Carmichael (b 1819) and Mary Campbell (b1823), farmers in Achinduin, visited to donate their family bible. Hugh and Mary were married in 1854 .This bible is a great asset as it is unusual in having family records at the centre of the book, which will be helpful in our genealogical work. It has a full record of Hugh and Mary’s children and descendants.
Bible of Hugh and Mary Carmichael of Achinduin Presented to Bob Hay by Fiona Mackay
Carmichael family descendants with the bible
Victorian English bible of Hugh and Mary Carmichael Carmichael