Enjoyed a few days visit from the Manchester cousins last week when John Francis Killeen and his sons Aiden and Oliver and grandson Michael who stayed in Rachra House while they visited the relations. Met them at breakfast on Friday morning and their host Pat Corbett kindly played a recording of an interview for a radio programme that his late uncle Pat Corbett of The Aughrim Slopes Ceili Band had given in New York about fifty years ago. Pat told of the original members of the four piece and how he and two others had joined to make a seven piece band. The interviewer played a number of songs sung by Pat Corbett and some favourite tunes. Pat Corbett masterpiece was The Old Bog Road. He told that once the band travelled to Dublin to carry out a recording for the national radio station and they received six pounds for their work. This sum was divided between the seven members.
My sister Pat was telling us later that a Martin Costelloe from New York often came to Ireland to carry out recordings and she remembers that on one occasion when Martin was recording Pat Corbett and the Aughrim Slopes in Killeen's sitting room that he found there was too much noise being picked up from the foot tapping of the band members, so he put cushions under their feet. The next tune was started and the musicians used to kick away the cushions and restart their beat.
On Saturday morning we took the cousins to visit America near Falthy school to see the place where their forefathers were evicted by the local landlord Mather nearly two hundred years ago. From there we went to Clonburren graveyard where we located the headstone of John Killian , who died in August 1847, aged 66 years. Stone erected by his son Mattie . We did a roundtrip of Clonburren and noticed that the famous stone at the bottom of the hill near the Bord na Mona site is not in place. At one time people cycling this road would dismount from their bicycles and wheel them around the stone. On then to have a look at The Motte from both sides. We took the branch road to Cappaleitra to look for the Mushroom stones and only found one near Martin Kenny's farmyard.