Sir, – Frank McNally's Irishman's Diary on Edgeworthstown and the Edgeworths was a well-written piece on my hometown (February 9th).
The “rural legend” that we were taught in the national school for boys in Edgeworthstown in the 1970s was that the patriarch of the family, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was the inventor of the road surface that came to be known as tarmac, and not John McAdam, a Scot who allegedly stole the idea from Edgeworth.
Somehow, though, taredgeworth just doesn’t have the same ring as tarmacadam! – Yours, etc,
BRENDAN McLOUGHLIN,
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Blackrock,
Co Dublin.