"On prizing up a few loose stones, one exposes heaps of enormous bluebell bulbs, white and skull-like in shape"

"On prizing up a few loose stones, one exposes heaps of enormous bluebell bulbs, white and skull-like in shape"

Lough Derg--Pilgrimage--Description--Alice Curtayne

The rampant flora overgrowing Saints' Island

Alice Curtayne, 1898-1981

Curtayne, Alice, Lough Derg: St. Patrick’s Purgatory, pp. 24-25

Burns Oats and Washbourn, Ltd., London and Dublin

1944

Citation for the purposes of criticism

Monograph

English

History

DD_0131

54.6153, -7.8864

"[On Saints' Island] ferns, mostly of the lady-fern variety, grow abnormally thick at their bases here, forming a stalk which gives them a most unusual appearance. There is also a thick spread of nettles. Rushes, too, growing in great robust masses, obliterate all traces of a sacred past as completely as Cromwell himself might have desired. On prizing up a few loose stones, one exposes heaps of enormous bluebell bulbs, white and skull-like in shape. Shortly after our visit, the island must have been veiled in the smoky-blue of their profuse florescence. Moss, too, has proved itself a great ally of the persecutor, smothering the level stones as though eager to complete their obliteration."

Monograph