Arthur O Leary

1773 - ARTHUR O LEARY - ‘Page 171. Of Kilcrea Abbey and Castle, Croker is silent: [Richard] Caulfield has some interesting notes. He has copied the inscriptions from many of its weather-worn and silent tombstones, and among them that of Arthur O Leary, around whose memory and on whose grave he has woven the following well-authenticated story. The epitaph upon his tomb is:-

This Arthur O Leary had entered the Hungarian service, and soon distinguished himself by his valour in the field. Having obtained a high military rank, he returned to Ireland to visit his friends, and brought with him his favourite horse, which carried him in the battlefield, and which he loved with an inexpressible tenderness. Upon a certain day Major O Leary joined the Muskery Hunt, and after a long and hard ride took the brush, his horse coming in at the finish and outstripping the field, among the rest a Mr. Morris, a magistrate who, under an old statute of William III, offered O Leary £5 0s 0d for the animal. This was too much from a country squire for a military man to endure, and the whip was freely used by both parties. The result was that, at a meeting of magistrates immediately convoked, Arthur O Leary was proclaimed an outlaw. And shortly after he was taken off his guard, when riding near Carriganimmy, and shot by a soldier from the pound, where a number had been stationed under the command of an officer, and who had been lying in wait for their prey, armed with loaded muskets. O Leary returned the fire from an old duelling pistol. The soldier who shot him remarked to his officer – I have covered the buckle of his shoe, and will hit him in the side.’ O Leary fell dead in the field, his faithful charger returned home and pawed the door of his dwelling house at Raleigh, near Macroom. Mr Morris went through a trial at Cork for causing O Leary’s death, but was of course acquitted. A wild spirit of revenge now actuated the relations and followers of O Leary, and Mr. Morris was selected as the victim; at the time he resided on Hammond’s Marsh, at the corner of St. Peter’s Church Lane. The Cork papers of the day inform us that three shots were fired at Mr. Morris, esq., at his lodgings in Mr. Boyce’s house, Hammond’s Marsh; the balls entered a little below the window, but did not mischief; the shots were fired by the deceased’s brother, who was seen in Peter’s Church Lane with a gun in his hand. O Leary’s brother escaped to America where he died. The remains of Arthur O Leary were first buried in a field near the abbey, but subsequently removed within its sacred precincts, where a stately altar tomb was erected to his memory in the north-east angle beneath the steeple. Here are also laid the remains of his grandson, Doctor Goodwin Purcell O Leary, MA, Professor of Materia Medica in the Queen’s College, Cork.’- (From notes to Smith’s Cork, reprinted 1893)

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