WILD SPORTS IN IRELAND. By John Bickerdyke. With an Introduction by Hugh W.L. Weir.

(1897) 2007 new edition. Small 8vo (129 x 204mm). Ppxviii,230. B/w photographs, bibliography. Pictorial laminated boards, issued without a dust-wrapper.

"John Bickerdyke" was the pen-name of Charles Henry Cook. Tales of fishing and shooting in the West of Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, with many passages on pike fishing, together with mentions of salmon and trout, slob trout, gillaroo and char. For this new edition the text has been entirely reset and the pictures clearly and carefully reproduced. Dr. Hugh Weir, the publisher, provides a two-page Introduction; largely a tribute to his friend, Thomas Rice Henn (1901-1974) who gave him a copy of the book together with a letter identifying many of its locations and characters. Henn wrongly named "John Bickerdyke" as Theodore Cook of Cambridge, but identified the setting of the book as Paradise Hill, Ballynacally in Co. Clare, and two of its characters as his uncle and grandfather. "Harry H is my uncle, then a Fellow of Trinity Hall, subsequently Bishop of Burnley. The Irish Judge is my grandfather, Thomas Rice Henn, Recorder of Galway and judge of the Western Circuit." Chapters include: A voyage of discovery; Moonlighters; In Clonoolia Bay; Among the Clare Hills; Brian Boru's Snipe; A Gillaroo Day; The fish that did not fail; Winter sports of the lake dwellers; Slob trout; Icebound, and a wild-goose; Commencing with yacht racing and ending with a bag of perch; Rudd versus medicine man; The forty pound pike; "Tempest toss'd".