Page 6 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

CHAIRPERSON’S INTRODUCTION

share of the suffering of the conflict. Anne Ferris TD in her essay
examines the toll taken by the war on three Bray women, Biddy
Whelan, Bridget Sherry and Mary Brien, who respectively lost a
boyfriend, a son and two sons, and whose devastation mirrored
that of hundreds of thousands of other Irishwomen for decades
to come. The third article in this World War 1 section, Mrs Le
Blond’s War, records the part played by Greystones woman
Elizabeth Le Blond (nee Hawkins-Whitshed). Having served as
a nurse in France during the first years of the war and toured
the battlefields in its immediate aftermath, Le Blond was fully
aware of the horrors which it entailed, and devoted her final
years to fostering international friendship as a means of
avoiding future conflict.

A feature of this volume is the focus in several articles on
the built environment of Greystones. Thus, A Walk Around
Greystones leads the reader on a tour of some of the most
historic sites in the town, while Colin Love’s Lost buildings of
Greystones stands as a valuable record of some now-
disappeared houses and the families associated with them. In
The Cúl of the Rock, Seamus Hayden applies his unrivalled
local knowledge to an interrogation of some of the photographic
evidence of the village which Greystones once was, while in No
Property Developers - Thank You, Brian White recounts an
early instance of ‘nimbyism’ at a time, interestingly, when the
town was just beginning to take on the shape which we know
today. And finally in this connection, one of the glories of
Greystones – the stained-glass windows in Holy Rosary Church
– is celebrated in our cover illustration, the photograph of which
was supplied by Pat Killilea.

Three other contributions take us beyond the confines of
Greystones: Brian White’s eighteenth-century maps offer a
survey of the local coastline, while Andrew Phelan describes

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