90. Tim Toole (Austin) Ballybeg, Inisturk, 1911
T.J. Westropp

I spent nearly the entirety of 1995 working in the National Museum of Ireland, cataloguing the thousands of negatives taken by T.J. Westropp, that were donated to the museum after his death. Endless photographs of Irish castles, dolmens, round towers, hill forts, virtually anything that didn't move, and if people were included they tended to be only ever in the background, or perhaps only included to show the scale of whatever object was being photographed. With three exceptions, this one of a family from Inisturk, one of a uniformed man at Cork Railway Station, and another of a fur-coated woman on a park bench taken on the day World War I ended, and which are presumably still somewhere deep in the archived collections of the National Museum of Ireland.

In the History and Archaeology chapter of the Clare Island Survey, 1911-1915, Westropp wrote:

"Mr Tim Toole tells me of a curious family tradition. The grand uncle, about a century ago, found a deposit of treasure, a vessel with lumps of gold, no ornaments being remembered, at the foot of the knoll, south of the gateway of the fort. He sold the rough gold for £40, but was told it was worth thousands."

C.I.S., p.48

Except it should have been Tim O'Toole, who I'm absolutely sure is the one on the left wearing the extremely jaunty homburg hat.