Philip Boucher-Hayes
speaker
466 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Sep
Philip Boucher-Hayes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Was there a lifting stone in every townland or in every parish or a couple in every county?
When I go west and I see the amount of lifting stones that are in Connemara and on the islands, I've literally just found two in the last month on Inish Mahan.
Again, that's four in the island of Inish Mahan and I'm sure there's more.
I think there was one of these in every town and I really think there was.
It was like pre-GAA, you know.
It was the gathering.
It was people who gather on a Sunday.
It was also powerful.
People would gather on a Sunday before or after Mass, and this crops up all over the place.
Before or after Mass on a Sunday, the men would gather and lift the stone.
And not just the men, too.
I mean, obviously, it would be more of a masculine thing, but there is specific female lifting stones in Ireland as well.
And there was a femininity strength test and a masculinity strength test.
And there are two specific stones in Clare, Cluckna Man and Cluckna Farr, which were the man's and the woman's lifting stone, where we lifted at funeral games.
So I just think it's amazing.
I mean, it's like, how do you find a whole lost culture?
How do we forget a whole lost culture?
That's the question that really begs asking is the speed with which this culture just disappeared and how completely, how totally it was erased.
Nobody knows.
It's like this whole sport that was massive in the country is gone.
Showing 81–100 of 466 · page 5 of 24
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