Visit Fermoy 100 years ago via newly digitised photos in the Breslin Archive
14th June 2022: Over 100 social history photographs of Fermoy and surrounding areas in County Cork have been published today on the Breslin Archive. The photographs include rarely seen images of the West (New) Barracks in Fermoy after they were torched in August 1922 during the Civil War, the National Army being welcomed by crowds outside the (no longer extant) Royal Hotel on Pearse Square, the old Fermoy Tennis Club, buildings near the old Aerodrome, a point-to-point race, various images of the Blackwater, and views of some of the big houses around Fermoy including Tullagreine, Castlehyde and Kilshannig.
John Breslin created the Breslin Archive in 2019 to digitally preserve analogue photographs of Ireland from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Breslin says: “It has taken some time to digitise and geolocate many of these images, but we are very excited to share this delightful album of photographs which will be of interest to both historians and locals in the Fermoy area. They are a window into the past lives, work activities and hobbies of some of the Irish social classes during the 1920s.”
These photographs are from a collection of six albums of primarily Irish photographic negatives that were taken by an as-of-yet unidentified photographer from 1919 to 1928, and provide a fascinating insight into the social history of Ireland at the time. The full collection, obtained in an auction of items from Dublin’s iconic Café en Seine, includes many views from Cork, Galway, and other Irish counties, with some yet to be scanned. The albums were fully indexed, catalogued and dated by the photographer, and the celluloid negatives themselves each measure 10 cm by 8 cm.
The digitised Fermoy photographs are now available to view online via the Breslin Archive’s Flickr page at bresl.in/fermoy, and all photographs are also available on the Breslin Archive website at www.breslin.org.
For further information, contact the Breslin Archive at archive@breslin.org.
