Some books you can pick up again and again. For example, one of Eric Craigie's reminiscences. You may not go in for yarns about grassing salmon or pursuing foxes and other animals on horseback or shooting birds out of the sky. But Eric's stories are, so often, about people rather than the game.
To show his devotion to water. He tells of his honey moon, the first part of it spent in Virginia at the hotel then run by the MacDonnells. The couple liked Lough Ramor so much they decided that if they had a son they would call him Ramor. The son duly arrived and was christened Ramor John. When the second child was on the way, his sister was knitting for the new arrival. "That's for Virginia", she said. When their third child was born, the clergyman said to the parents at the font "I suppose you'll call this one Poulaphouca". No. She was called Miriam after her grandmother.
Eric often tells stories against himself. As when, on Lough Sheelin, he was asked to take out a young man who was finding the hotel boring. Eric asked the boy if he had ever rowed or had any interest in fishing. To the second question he replied definitely no. So Eric showed him how to feather the oars and so on and in a quarter of an hour the lad could whip the boat round to a fish "better than I have seen many an expert." Afterwards he told him he had never seen anyone get into the swing as he had done. "Well," came the answer, "you're a very good instructor, but as a matter of fact, I'm stroke of the Trinity Eight."
He had a touching regard for the people of the West whom he met on his expeditions from the family lodge there. He loved them. He had a feeling for the genius of a place. Lough Annagh in Offaly, where he had once had a romantic early morning meeting with a beautiful young girl, "had a tremendous soothing effect on my mind, even to sit aimlessly throwing stones into the water appeared to relax my whole system." These incidents from Irish Sporting
Sketches (Lilliput). But later along with Zircon, there was published the collection An Irish Sporting Life.
Eric is no longer with us, but his writings bring back to us an Irishman of great heart.