Search Results for 'Law Life Assurance Society'

It is probable that if the coastal route had been chosen for the Clifden railway, rather than the Oughterard/ Maam Cross way, the line would still be viable today. The idea of the so-called ‘Balfour lines’, proposed by an enlightened chief secretary for Ireland, Arthur J Balfour, and given the go-ahead in the 1889 Light Railways (Ireland) Act, was to give far-flung towns and communities access to bigger markets, and to grasp the benefits of employment and opportunities.

Following the inability of Tom Martin and his daughter Mary, the Princess of Connemara, to meet the debts on their vast encumbered estate, they were sued by the Law Life Assurance Society and ordered to sell it in its entirety.

After her Connemara tour Maria Edgeworth kept up a correspondence with the Martins. She followed their fortunes and misfortunes with all the attention of an enthralled novel-reader. There was plenty to hold her attention. In the spring of 1835 the Martins travelled to London where Mary was presented at court and moved in fashionable society, attending dinner parties and charity events, of which a cynical Lord Byron remarked that these galas were nothing less than a marriage market.

As the legendary Colonel Richard Martin neared the end of his life in Boulogne, where he had fled to escape his numerous creditors, a large four-horse carriage, on which two postilions, in jackets of dark-blue frieze, guided the coach on horse-back, arrived at the front door of Ballynahinch. It was dark, and its occupants were in a state of near exhaustion.