An Irish Sporting Life

An Irish Sporting Life combines the author’s previous best-sellers Irish Sporting Sketches and Telling Tales. Part social history, part record of country life, this sparkling memoir warmly conveys the humour and sorrows, and above all, the unfailing celebration that has been Eric Craigie’s lot as an industrialist, farmer, inventor and former Master of the Ward Union Hunt. In this lovingly assembled scrapbook the author looks back across seventy years vividly recreating a fast-vanishing milieu – stag-hunting with the Ward Union, duck shooting on Wexford’s sloblands, salmon-fishing on the Owenduff, Boyne and Blackwater rivers. With candour and wry humour he evokes the places and people of the Irish countryside; Count John McCormack, George V. Malcolmson, Queen Mary and Charles J. Haughey are among a memorable cast. Anecdote follows anecdote about fishing, coursing and shooting; about farming and fish farming; about hunting and horse-racing; about every aspect of his long life as a dairy businessman and farmer, bird-watcher and rugby player, and above all, as a man with enormous gusto for living.