BELLAMONTAGNA: The story of an Irish family

By Richard Heygate

I spent my early years in a big old house in Northern Ireland, along with my lively bunch of five stepsisters. We had a lot of simple. Inexpensive fun like attending mountain "Ceilidhs" in Donegal, but we also had the example of my grandparents generation: 3 boys and 4 girls brought up in the last quarter of the 19th Century. These left an extraordinary legacy: a wonderful collection of books, correspondence, water colours, and house newspapers, collected by my Great Aunt Etta and stored in a sealed box against some future secret use. When I retired from my active business life, I read through all this material, but was puzzled about what the "secret" might be, until I saw the picture above, which I have used as a cover of the book. It shows the children coming back from a late night dance, getting lost on the mountain road and having to ask the way at a remote Catholic pub. Kat, the youngest and prettiest of the girls, asked the landlords son for direction and got a saucy grin and the strange reply "Follow on straight ahead and mind out for the Whiteboys". There was some strange electricity between her and the boy, and so it proved - and became the heart of the book. Kat asked her family what White Boys were (she had never encountered the more rebellious side of Ireland), and got this reply.. "They were called 'Ribbon Men' in the North," said Mama, "but there has not been much evidence of them hereabouts for a long while. In the South they used to make a great nuisance of themselves". Arthur, her younger brother, had been taking a more than usual interest in the conversation and broke in here. "They had good cause. It all started with Cromwell giving so much land to pay off his army and the speculators who had bankrolled his blood-stained conquest. They were all Protestants, and militant ones at that with no knowledge of Ireland and its people. They became determined to dispossess and force into poverty as many of the Catholic Irish as possible. Rights for tenancy or land holding, even if they existed, were thrown aside and the native Irish were forced to remove to the poorest lands in the West of the country and treated like idiot peasants. New laws were set up to stop Catholics having any say in how the country was run. The results in many cases were terrible famine and suffering, which still haunt Ireland, although the laws about Catholic ownership have recently been changed for the better". After breakfast, Kat spent a long time with Arthur, learning more about his side of Ireland, and they came up with the idea of a secret society for the seven of them to become involved in Ireland's revollution, with Kat as spy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F68LN7FL
• ISBN13: 9798281065610
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 267 Pages
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 0.6" x 8.3"