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Making hay when the sun don't shine: the Rev. William Richardson, science and society in early nineteenth-century Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2015

Allan Blackstock*
Affiliation:
Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Ulster, Coleraine

Extract

So wrote William Hamilton Drummond in 1811 in reference to an extraordinary grass known by the old Irish name of fiorin (fiorthann), whose properties had been discovered by a fellow cleric, William Richardson (1740–1820). Richardson claimed fiorin could produce abundant winter hay and help reclaim bogland. Though Donaldson’s Agricultural biography of 1854 dismissed Richardson’s work as ephemeral and careless, in 1806 the leading British scientist Humphry Davy visited Richardson and was impressed enough to recommend him to the Board of Agriculture and include fiorin in his famous lecture series translated into every major European language.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2011

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References

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80 Donaldson, , Agricultural Biography, pp 107–8;Google ScholarBelfast News-Letter, 2 Mar. 1853.

81 I would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for permission to draw on archive material in their keeping: the deputy keeper of the records P.R.O.N.I.; the Linenhall Library; the Robinson Library, Armagh.