A striking front cover for the current issue of Bord Failte's Ireland of the Welcomes. It shows a stone Virgin with child, unfinished but arresting. The story goes that it was refused by the priest who commissioned it for his church because the infant Jesus was held on the right rather than the left side; another version is that the commissioning priest died before the work was completed. And there today it stands at Ballyknockan, Co Wicklow.
Another famous reject is that of a lion which stands outside "Granite House, ancestral home of the McEvoy family". It was rejected many years ago as part of the entrance to Stormont, the seat of the parliament of Northern Ireland because, it was said, the lion was not impressive enough. Unfortunately, no picture of this apparently unimpressive creature. There is much modern machinery in three quarries of Ballyknockan which provide granite on an industrial scale, but the craft of stone-cutting is not lost. Three men: "Andy Farrington, Larry Foster and Christy McEvoy will turn out a hand-cut water-trough or piece of garden furniture for you as good as any article produced by their ancestors."
Indeed there's a photograph of David McEvoy carving a traditional Celtic Cross from a slab of granite. "This skill has almost become extinct in Ireland today." The writer is Seamus O Maitiu, photos by Brian Lynch. Read the whole article: fascinating.
You may never have been to Crookhaven which "lies about as far down in southwest Cork as you can go without falling into the sea", but when you read what Jo Kerrigan has written about it, and when you look at the photographs by Richard T Mills, you would want to get into the car at once, for seldom in this magazine has such a magnificent spread of photography been seen.
"Crookhaven has always had a hypnotic almost siren-like attraction for its visitors" writes Jo Kerrigan. Now that must go for readers of this magazine.
Mary O'Sullivan's four pages of book reviews leads off with Amergin by Jan de Fouw (Wolfhound Press £8.99). A "beautiful little book," she writes. Christopher Moriarty enlightens you in his "Byways Rather than Highways" with a trip along the Boyne ("the home of the legendary salmon of knowledge"). Ten pages of photos and text on the West Clare railway. What more do you want?