Tales from Longford:  The Bath Road milestones

 

Few of us, as we drive along the A4 on the northern edge of Heathrow airport, realise we are travelling on an old coaching route called The Great Bath Road. Nor can we now imagine how it felt for the eighteenth-century travellers in their coaches and carriages, bumping along the hardened earth road, stopping every seven miles to change horses, eat and drink, and enduring that for the three-day journey to Bath. Whilst most people have forgotten the history of the Bath Road there are still reminders of the old days which lie unnoticed against a fence or a wall on the airport side of the road.

The road was a busy coaching route between London and Bath where fashionable gentry would take the medicinal waters. After leaving Hounslow the road crossed part of the isolated Hounslow Heath which brought with it the additional fear of being robbed by highwaymen, but it did not deter passengers from making the journey. The carriages would stop to change horses at the many inns along the route, and passengers would have time to refresh themselves at the Three Magpies at Sipson Green, or the four inns in Longford. For the passengers, the coach journey along the Bath Road, was not a comfortable ride. The packed earth surface was sometimes reinforced with gravel dug from the nearby fields, but this did not prevent it from becoming a constant source of complaint. The vehicle wheels damaged the surface, and dry hot weather baked the mud into deep ruts, which in wet weather would fill with water and produce cloying mud. The solution was to impose a proper maintenance plan on the road. On 1 June 1727 thirty-two trustees met at the George Inn, Colnbrook, for the first meeting of the Colnbrook Turnpike Trust. This trust was formed to maintain the Bath Road, for a length of seven miles, between Cranford Bridge and Maidenhead Bridge. The cost of the road maintenance would come from tolls paid by the highway users. The improved road surface, strengthened by a proper gravel surface and improved drainage, meant the journey-time to Bath could be shortened to less than a day, but there was still room for improvement.

In 1741 the Colnbrook Trust erected mile stones along the seven miles of Bath Road under their administration. The stones were commissioned from Mr Woodruff of Windsor and cost £2 8s each. Although recut in the 1820s the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth miles stones are still in place today. They show the distance between local towns as well as the total distance from Hyde Park Corner.

 

One of the natural hazards in the summer for the Bath Road travellers was the choking dust created by the wheels of the carriages breaking up the dried mud on the road. In 1827 the Colnbrook Turnpike Trust spent £759 on trying to solve this problem. They had wells dug every two miles, installed pumps and bought new water carts. The pumps were made by Fowler & Co of Lambeth and were about two metres high in order to be tall enough to fill a barrel mounted on a cart. The water carts would then be used to spray water on the road in order to lay the dust. From March to October the road would be watered twice daily in dry weather, except for Sundays. This practice continued into the twentieth century until just before the first World War when the road surface was sprayed with tar. One of these pumps has been preserved, today, at Longford near the 15th milestone.

 

Today we hardly notice the milestones which still mark the miles from London as they have done for 283 years, but they are still there and still standing smartly to attention to fulfil their purpose. The thirteenth-mile marker is outside the telephone exchange at Harlington Corner and opposite the Best Western Arial hotel and the Airport Bowl.  The fourteenth is just past the Three Magpies pub, near Newport Road that leads onto the Northern Perimeter Road West, and opposite the Leonardo Hotel. The fifteen-mile marker is against a car park fence and opposite a petrol filling station and a MacDonalds where the Peggy Bedford pub used to be. This and the sixteenth marker, close to the bridge that carries the Old Bath Road over the M25 near Colnbrook, will be removed if Longford village is demolished to make way for the Third Runway, and another piece of Longford history will disappear.

Read more about the last three hundred years of Longford in:

 "Longford: A Village in Limbo" by Wendy Tibbitts

For a “Look Inside” option for this book go to 

  https://b2l.bz/WUf9dc

The river built for a King’s vanity.

 

The bridge built by King William IV at Longford in 1834

The Longford River, in Middlesex, UK, is not a river but a canal cut by a King and now owned by a King. It starts from a place on the Colne/Wraysbury river in the village of Longford at a point just after a four-acre island. The main river flows on to join the Thames at Staines, whilst the man-made river flows south. This passes through the Middlesex villages of Stanwell and Bedfont where it is only metres away from one of Europe’s busiest Airports. It then flows through Feltham, Hanworth Park, Hampton and Bushy Park before fulfilling its purpose in the Hampton Court Palace water gardens and exiting into the River Thames.

This artificial river was dug on the orders of Charles I in 1638 to improve the flow of water to the Hampton Court fountains.[1] He designed the fountains to impress his wife, Henrietta Maria. It was often known as the King’s, Queen’s or Cardinal’s river, but is now universally known as the Longford River and is still Crown property.

Soon after the river leaves the River Colne at the Saxon village of Longford it crosses The Great Bath Road. This busy road, which leads to Windsor, Reading and Bath, was once in constant use by horses, carts and carriages. After years of coachmen having to negotiate the narrow bridge that crossed the Kings River, and over which successive Monarchs had been driven on their journey’s to and from Windsor, King William IV decided to do something about it. In 1834 he had built a cast iron bridge bordered on each side by an elliptical arch with a parapet with a trellis design. In the centre of the arch is a plaque with a raised crown and underneath “WR IV 1834”. This is now a Grade II listed structure.

 

As Crown property the river was strictly monitored to prevent any external encroachments on the river or its surroundings. In Victorian times only those granted permission by Mr. Jesse the Superintendent of Palaces were allowed to fish in the river. One of those granted a line permit was William Singleton, a grocer from Hampton. He was fishing at 7pm on 31 August 1846 when he saw two men retrieving stunned or dying fish that were floating on the surface from the river. The following morning about 6am a local Surgeon, Henry Jepson, who also had a permit, was fishing with a line when he was asked by Mr Plumbridge, a river inspector, whether he had seen anyone on the riverbank. Mr Plumbridge had received information that fish had been seen floating in the river, and a passerby had pointed out two suspicious men. Fifteen minutes later, the Doctor saw two men on the bridge looking down into the shallow water. It was a while before he saw what they were looking at until he spotted, laying on the bottom of the river, several large fish some dying, and some dead—they appeared to be under the influence of some narcotic and as he looked he saw more. They were everywhere. He pulled a couple of the roach out of the water and took them home to examine them. Later that evening, in the presence of Mr Plumbridge and of Mr Benbow, the local chemist, he surgically cut them open and discovered they had deep yellow matter in their stomachs, which he knew to be characteristics of the coculus indicus plant. This plant often called the Indian berry or fishberry induces stupefying effects, and although a poison was, until it was banned in the mid-nineteenth century, sometimes added to cheap beer to make it more intoxicating. Adding the berries or a paste of the berries would have stupefied the fish making them easier to catch. At the subsequent trial at the Old Bailey on 21 September 1846, nineteen year old Jesse Lucas, one of the men looking over the bridge, stood in the Dock. George Henry Benbow, a chemist from Hampton gave evidence that the accused came into his shop on the afternoon of 31 August and bought half-an-ounce of coculus indicus.

Mr Benbow said, “he did not ask for it by that name—I do not remember the name he called it—it is called by so many names—it was the common name—but I sold him half an ounce of coccnlus indicus—he did not say what he wanted it for—before he left the shop I cantioned him—I told him it was transportation to use it—I did not say what for”.

He told the Court that he was present when Mr Jepson opened the fish that had been removed from the river. “I am satisfied that what was found was coculus indicus—I know that it is sometimes mixed with dough and put into the water.”

Jesse Lucas was born in Hampton Common.[2] His father had died when he was a baby and he had been in trouble before, but had been holding down a job as a bricklayers’ labourer for the last 18 months. Now he was in serious trouble. When the two men were arrested, Lucas’s companion, Jim Lee, sprinted away and was never found. At the trial Jesse Lucas’ defence statement was, “I never chucked any stuff in.” Nevertheless he was found guilty and sentenced to transportation for seven years. He was first taken to Pentonville Prison and then transferred to Millbank and a prison hulk. Weighing 9st 11lbs he had to do hard labour until after eighteen months he was put on board the Anna Maria and sailed for Port Phillip, Melbourne, Australia. He then disappears from the records.

 

Fishing was not the only activity restricted by the Crown authorities. It was an offence to use the water for irrigation or to damage the river or its banks with any type of construction other than that authorised by the Crown authorities. In 1836 William Stevens of Longford was summoned before the Magistrates Court by the Superintendent of the water supply belonging to her Majesty to Hampton Court. Stevens was charged with pulling down and damaging the palisade fence enclosing the river. He was convicted with a penalty of twelve shillings and costs and sent to the treadmill for one month.[3]

 

The Crown employed men to help maintain the river, one such riverman was Thomas Hedges. He lived at the Kings Arms in Longford village. He used a long shallow boat like a punt to dredge the river and keep the banks clear of weeds. Hedges also had an obligation to report on misuse of the river. On 12 August 1878 Mr. Hedges was in the Kings Arm’s tap room when a labourer called Edmund Buckland accused Hedges of not lending him his boat. Hedges said he wouldn’t lend it to him and an argument broke out which resulted in a fight, although Hedges did not return the blows. Buckland was drunk and had previous convictions and was upset that Hedges had caught him netting the river. Buckland was found guilty of assault and was fined fifteen shillings (a week’s wages).[4]

 

The bridges over the Longford river had been maintained by the Crown authorities, but complaints about the narrowness of the bridges for modern traffic, caused conflict between the local council and H.M. Office of Works in the late 19th century. The Board declared it did not have a budget for replacing the bridges, nor were they willing to assign additional land for a wider bridge. In 1901 an attempt was made for the Middlesex County Council to take over the ownership of the bridges from the Crown, but negotiations broke down. The issue was still unresolved in 1913, when H.M. Office of Works said they had no money for bridge improvements but they were willing to re-open negotiations about the ownership of the bridges.[5] In fact under the Crown Lands Act 1906 bridges owned by the Crown could be transferred to any authority “willing and able to accept such a conveyance”. So one by one the local councils along the route of the Longford river applied to take responsibility for a bridge in their area and removing the necessity to keep applying the Crown when maintenance or improvements were necessary. They were however to do nothing that would interfere with the flow of the river.[6]

As well as the issue of the bridges there were other construction issues. There was a smallpox outbreak in 1907 and the Staines council wanted to build an isolation hospital near the Longford River. The Crown authorities objected strongly to this, the inference being that the river could be contaminated in some way.[7] In 1914 Feltham council applied to H.M. Office of Works for permission to utilise a portion of the Longford River as a bathing place, but permission was refused. However they did concede that if the Council wanted to build a swimming bath near to the river then, on receiving details, they would sanction the use of the water from the river. Council Surveyors estimated that such a swimming bath would cost £830, but with the start of the First World War, the Council decided to defer the proposal at that time.[8]

 

Occasionally nature interfered with river. In severe winters the river would freeze over. At other times the storms caused flooding. Cottages next to the river in Stanwell were flooded in 1914 and the council requested that the surface water be allowed to drain into the Longford river, but the Crown objected as they felt it would cause pollution.[9]

 

This water hazard also caused tragedy. In Hanworth in 1894 72 year old Charlotte Penfold accidentally fell in the river. Her body was seen floating down stream face down by a neighbour William Morgan. He managed to get her out of the water and called a doctor, but she was pronounced dead. At her inquest it was explained that she had recently had influenza and was still groggy when she went to the river bank to feed the ducks. It was thought she had become dizzy and fallen in and a verdict was returned of Accidental Death. Mrs Penfold had been a respected member of the parish of Hanworth for 35 years. Her late husband was the foreman at Curtis and Harveys Mills (gunpowder mill on Hounslow Heath) for many years. Another long-term worker from Curtis and Harvey accidentally drowned in the river in 1922. George Rowe, aged 71, of River View Villas, Bedfont, fell in the river. He was in the habit of rising early and walking along the banks to see his son.[10] Not all drownings were accidental. Elizabeth Martin, aged 31, was found drowned in the river, after leaving her three children with a neighbour and a note for her husband, who was working away. The inquest verdict was suicide.[11]

 

When Charles I began his quest for a picturesque water garden at Hampton Court and spared no expense in getting twelve miles of waterway cut from the Colne River to feed it, he probably never envisaged the growth of Middlesex surburbia, nor transport such as planes and automobiles. But the fact that it has survived for 385 years through changing times, and its tranquil waters and natural habitats have given pleasure to many over that time means that the river is well-loved and admired. It will be sad to see it disappear into a culvert at Longford if the third runway is built at Heathrow airport and the village of Longford is demolished.

 

Wendy Tibbitts is the author of “Longford: A Village in Limbo” now available in paperback and ebook.

For a “Look Inside” option for this book go to  https://b2l.bz/WUf9dc 

 

[1] Wikipedia. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Longford_River_at_Bedfont_-_water_for_Hampton_Court_-_geograph.org.uk_-_112074.jpg

[2] Ancestry.co.uk

[3] Windsor and Eton Express – Saturday 24 December 1836.

[4] Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette - Saturday 24 August 1878]

[5] Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette - Saturday 27 September 1913

[6] Crown Lands Act 1906 An Act to amend the Crown Lands Acts, 1829 to 1894 1906 CHAPTER 28 6 Edw 7

[7] Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette - Saturday 28 September 1907

[8] Middlesex Chronicle - Saturday 07 November 1914

[9] Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette - Saturday 11 April 1914

[10] Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette - Friday 17 February 1922

[11] Uxbridge & W. Drayton Gazette - Saturday 18 April 1908

Yeomans and the Tax Collector

Yeomans and the Tax Collector

Yeomans, Longford, Middlesex

Thomas Streeting was not a popular man. He lived in the biggest house in the village of Longford, Middlesex, and employed many of the villagers to work on his farm. This non-conformist land-owner might have received the respect of his labourers, but in some households he was unwelcome. He was the parish tax collector and twice a year he visited every house in the village to collect taxes. 

The tax collector’s job was unpaid. The gentry of the parish formed the Vestry Meeting (parish council) and oversaw the parish governance. Each member of the Meeting was expected to play an important, but voluntary, role. One member would be appointed as tax assessor. His job was to assess the rental value of each property, and this would be the figure on which the land and poor relief tax was based. The assessment varied little from year to year. Then the nominated tax collector, in this case Thomas Streeting, would have the job of extracting these sums from his friends and neighbours in the parish.

There were government taxes to be collected, too. In 1748 there were 34 land tax payers in Longford. This was a regular tax paid twice yearly from 1692 until 1963. However, in the reign of George III, this was not enough to fund the various conflicts that Britain was fighting in Europe and Colonial America, and so other sources of taxation had to be found, some of them very inventive. In 1696 window tax was introduced which was easy to assess. The Longford records for the years 1766/1767 show who had to pay window tax. Most houses, with seven windows or less paid a flat amount of two shillings a year. For larger houses there was a variable rate. In 1767 Thomas Streeting, as owner of one of the largest houses in Longford with nineteen windows, was paying twelve shillings for his window tax and £4.17.6d for his land. Thomas Streeting died in December 1773 and his son-in-law, Thomas Weekly, at the Weekly house took on his role as Tax Collector. Thomas Weekly’s voluntary job of collecting taxes was now not just a time-consuming, form-filling, distraction from his farm and his Baptist chapel, but was an onerous role to perform when individuals objected to having to pay extra tax when they were struggling to survive after the poor harvests of 1795.[1]

There were so many different taxes to collect that parish tax collectors received a preprinted form from the government to help them enumerate them all. Previous tax collections in the parish had just been noted in a hand made notebook. One new tax was on male servants (1777-1852). A male servant was considered a luxury and their employers' were liable to pay tax for this privilege. Those servants engaged in husbandry, trade or manufacture were exempted. The servants of tavern-keepers, shop-keepers and merchants were also exempt unless they performed any personal duties like scrubbing floors or cleaning shoes, or saddling a horse. In 1779 this tax was one guinea per servant per year.

Another tax was Horse Tax (1784-1874). This was liable on riding horses, including racehorses, but not working horses. In 1785 an amendment exempted those farmers occupying a farm worth not more than £150 a year rent in which the horse was used only for riding to church or market. The yearly rental exemption rate was reduced in 1802 and thus many more owners were liable.

There was also a dog tax (5 July 1796 to 5 April 1797). This was a tax on non-working dogs, and people receiving poor rate were exempt. Most people in Longford had just one dog, but Mrs Bedford at the Kings Arms inn (now the Grade II listed King Henry or The Stables) had two dogs.

The following tax year, there was also a clocks and watch tax with a variable rate depending on whether the watch was gold, silver, or of another metal. Thomas Weekly’s tax bill was 4s.10½d on his thirteen windows, and 11s.3d on his five horses. He had one clock and one silver watch for which he paid five shillings seven and a half old pence. Of the 60 householders/rate payers in the parish only 35 had a clock and 5 had two clocks. No one had a gold watch. This tax was repealed nine months later. It was difficult to collect because people hid or disposed of their clocks and watches. Inn-keepers were happy to pay the tax when they found that their clocks attracted customers who came in just to check the time, but it was devastating for the clock and watch manufacturers when people no longer bought them.[2] Not only was the tax payer liable to these sundry taxes, but in some years a surcharge of 20% was added to the total.

In 1796 Britain, after years of fighting in the American war of Independence and in the process losing the colonies, was now fighting a war against Spain and a separate conflict with France. The government needed to introduce more taxes to fund these wars. They had already been levying tax on all types of possessions, but then the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, in anticipation of the need to establish a war chest of cash in case of a war with Napoleon who had just became First Console of France, had to think of other means to raise tax. In addition to the supplementary taxes in 1799 the Prime Minister introduced, the concept of income tax as a means of raising funds for the government. It was the first tax to be raised on people’s incomes and was intended as a temporary tax.[3] Anyone earning over £60 per annum had to pay ten per cent of their income. Initially it had to be collected from individuals and was not deducted at source until four years later. However, most of Longford’s labourers earned less than £1 a week and were not eligible. The introduction of this tax reduced Pitt’s popularity.

Those eligible to pay tax sometimes struggled to find the money, especially when the amount demanded varied from year to year. The increasing taxation was inflationary making goods cost more, but wages did not keep up. A pound in 1795 would be worth £117 today. This does not seem an excessive amount to pay today, but compared to the average earnings of an agricultural labourer of fifteen shillings a week, all of which would go on food and rent, for some people it would be a struggle.[4] This is why the parish tax collector was not a popular man.

[1] https://bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/01n1a5.pdf

[2] https://taxfitness.com.au/Blog/the-clock-tax-of-1797#:~:text=The%20tax%20was%20introduced%20by,their%20clocks%20or%20destroyed%20them. [3] www.politics.co.uk

[4] A Short History of English Agriculture by W. H. R. Curtler

This house and the village of Longford in West Middlesex will be demolished if the third runway at Heathrow airport is built.  My book, Longford: A Village in Limbo, which tells the story of Longford over the last three hundred years, is due for publication soon.

 

Tales from Longford: The Weekly House

This house and the village of Longford in West Middlesex will be demolished when the third runway at Heathrow airport is built.

The Weekly House 2018.

It had been ten years since the Great Fire of London, and Thomas Weekly, a wealthy London cloth-merchant was looking for a change in lifestyle. His ride along the Great Bath Road from his home in Westminster led him to the village of Longford, fifteen miles from London, in search of a farm that was for sale in the centre of the village.  Recently married he wanted to build a home for his bride and establish himself as a farmer and maltster.  As a Baptist, and a descendant of John Wycliffe, the medieval theological reformer, he was attracted to this village of non-conformists, who were now openly able to meet without fear of prosecution.

Thomas Weekly bought the farm and built the Weekly House as a family home. It was quite different from the timber-framed Tudor inns and houses that already existed in the village. The house was two storeys high and built of red-brick with two attic rooms, and a high pitched tiled roof. The walls were thick and the large sash windows had internal wooden shutters.

The two main rooms had huge beamed fireplaces large enough to stand-up in, with recesses in the chimney for smoking hams. These fireplaces and those of the bedrooms all connected to the central chimney. The beautiful staircase with wooden bannisters continued up to the attic on the second floor where there were two large attics rooms and a box room. On the northern side of the ground floor was a single-storey cool store room with hooks for storing hams and next to that a white washed dairy. On the eastern wall of the house was a large single-storey kitchen with a huge fireplace matching the one on the other side of the wall in the main house. As well as the kitchen, there was a boot room, log store and outside privy.

Next to the house, parallel to the Great Bath Road, Thomas Weekly built a long, weather-boarded malting barn, and separating the barn from the road was a brick-built wall with sloped and rounded coping.

Grade II listed barn next to Weekly House 2018.

Thomas Weekly and his family, lived in this house from the end of the seventeenth century, until the last surviving Weekly died in the house in 1899. After that the house and land was inherited by their cousins, the Wilds, who occupied the house until 1940. During the war the empty building was used as an ARP Warden’s post, and also an HQ for the local Home Guard. It suffered damage to the roof in 1944 when a flying bomb landed nearby and debris hit the Weekly House. After the roof was patched up the house stood empty. All its farmland had been compulsorily requisitioned to build a war-time airport in the neighbouring hamlet of Heathrow. In 1948 the Weekly House was bought by a local resident, Christopher Challis, who set about restoring it, with the help of the local blacksmith, Tom Adams, and made it into a family home once more. It is for this reason the house has survived. The house is now an office building and the House, barn and wall are now all grade II listed structures. The barn, now overgrown and derelict, is now on the Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register 2020.

When Thomas Weekly journeyed to Longford in 1676 he was not to know that he had founded a dynasty that continued for three centuries in the village of Longford. The family saw the village prosper and grow, and witnessed many historic events on the only road through the village, The Great Bath Road.

The Weekly House when it was a working farm.
Early twentieth century

My book, Longford: A Village on the Edge of Extinction, which tells the story of Longford over the last three hundred years, is due for publication soon.

 

Tales from Longford: The Strawberry Season

The village of Longford in West Middlesex will be demolished when the third runway at Heathrow airport is built.  

  

Zion Cottage

At first light, the front door of Zion Cottage opened on a glorious June morning in 1900.  Mrs Clara Brain, dressed in a shawl and head scarf with a white apron over her long black skirt, walked towards The Farm in the centre of Longford.  Even though it was 3am she were joined by a growing stream of similarly dressed women all moving in the same direction. The village was quiet as most residents had yet to begin their morning routine.  When the women reached the field they replaced their white aprons with coarse hessian sacks, criss-crossed their shawls across their bodies, under their arms and tied them at the back. They pulled their long skirts up between their legs and hitched them into the front of the waistband.  In the field, the boy from the village with his wooden rattle had been scaring the birds away since first light.  He was pleased to have some company.  The women immediately set to work.  The foreman allocated a row of strawberry plants to each girl.  He handed out wooden punnets and the girls picked the ripest fruit handling only the stem. The punnets were lined with a strawberry leaves before the fruit was laid gently on top.  Later in the packing shed, each punnet would be weighed to make sure it weighed exactly a pound, then 36 punnets would be packed in a wooden crate and the lid nailed down.  About sixty of these crates would be stacked ten-high on a lightweight yellow strawberry van that with one fast horse could travel the fifteen miles along the Bath Road to Covent Garden market in one and a half-hours.  Strawberries with the dew still on them would sell at a premium price in the market.

 

Fruit was one of the main produce of the market gardens in West Middlesex in the nineteenth century, but there was often a glut.  An enterprising farmer in nearby Sipson, Jonathon Smith, had started a Jam Factory there in the 1890s which would buy any farm surpluses.  One of the main crops in mid-summer was strawberries.  The berries ripened in the open fields where the strawberry plants were laid out in long rows and the plants packed with straw around them so that the slugs could not reach the ripe fruit.  The strawberry-picking season was relatively short, but labour intensive, and because the plants were at ground level, back-breaking.  The warm sun of mid-summer made the job easier, but in pouring rain it was unpleasant work.  Women were regarded as the best pickers of strawberries because of their light touch and Longford had an army of women who would rise at dawn to pick them.

 

Clara Brain was born in Weston on the Green, Oxfordshire, in 1856. She and  married the boy next door, West Brain, in 1889 when they were both 33 and moved to Longford  before the end of the century. Her husband worked as an agricultural labourer for H.J. Wild the biggest employer in Longford. Most of the farmland is now under Heathrow airport, but the main farmhouse still survives as the Grade II listed Weekly House.  West Brain was always known as Brother Brain because of his way of greeting people by calling them ‘brother’.  He was a lifelong Baptist and never missed going to chapel every Sunday.  His employer described him as a “salt of the earth”.  West died in Longford at the age of 87. Clara worked in the fields at harvest times, but was mostly a housewife. She won prizes for her bread and pastry-making in local produce shows.  She died in Longford aged 90 in 1947.

My book, Longford: A Village on the Edge of Extinction, is due for publication soon.