Tim Toole (Austin) Ballybeg, Inisturk, 1911

A photograph taken by T.J. Westropp.

Spent nearly the entirety of 1995 cataloguing the photographs taken by T.J. Westropp, that were donated to the National Museum of Ireland after his death. Thousands of images of Irish castles, dolmens, round towers, hillforts, virtually anything that didn’t move, and if people were included they tended to be only ever in the background, or perhaps only included to show the scale of whatever object was being photographed. With two notable exceptions, this one of a family from Inisturk, and another of a fur-coated woman on a park bench taken on the day World War I ended, the negatives of which are presumably still somewhere deep in the archived collections of the Museum.

In the History and Archaeology chapter of the Clare Island Survey, 1911-1915, Westropp wrote:
“Mr Tim Toole tells me of a curious family tradition. The grand uncle, about a century ago, found a deposit of treasure, a vessel with lumps of gold, no ornaments being remembered, at the foot of the knoll, south of the gateway of the fort. He sold the rough gold for £40, but was told it was worth thousands.”
C.I.S., p.48

Except it should have been Tim O’Toole, who I’m absolutely sure is the one on the left wearing the most jaunty homburg hat.

This is an intentionally imperfect cleaned up negative of the scanned negative.