by Tony Waldron

 This is an account of what I heard when I was growing up.

I spent a lot of my time in Grannies in Mulpit. It must have been an awful time for my grandfather and Grandmother. Their eldest son was in France fighting for the freedom of small nations and their second son Jack was gone to fight with Liam Mellows. My grandmother told me they were only eating their breakfast on Easter Monday who only comes in but Bob McCoy. The grandmother copped on to what he was looking for. He was looking to see who was missing so he could go and tell the Auld Peelers. The McCoys were black then, so he got a short shrift from the grandmother. She cleared him.

I remember as a young lad, I found this thing. You could see it was the barrel of an old gun. So, I asked my uncle Michael where it came from or what sort of gun it was, and he told me it was an old muzzle loader, and that it was the gun Jack had in Moyode in 1916. There was a special sort of dish for melting the lead to make the shot. I seen it stuck in the wall of the cart house. Uncle Michael told me what it was. He told me what you had to do to load the gun. You poured the gunpowder down the barrel and packed it with a ramrod, then you put in the wadding and packed it, then you put in the shot. You had a cap that you placed under the hammer, and you pulled the trigger. The hammer came down on the cap and set off the powder and fired the shot. Their faces used to be all black.

When they disbanded in Limepark, Jack came home and he buried the gun up in the Cruachan for another day. He was arrested and spent a couple of years I gaol in England. I wrote about what happened to him when the Tans left him for dead but Sin Sceal Eile