Barrington's Blood-Hound

John Johnson Marshall

Popular Rhymes and Sayings of Ireland

1924

Chapter XI

The “Kingdom of Kerry” is an alternative name for that picturesque County. Kerry was a Palatinate. The Desmond Earls were, it is well known, both proud and jealous of their Palatine privileges, and long struggled to maintain the liberties of Kerry, and the “jura regalia” of the principality independent of the royal authority.

Miss Hickson in “Old Kerry Records” quotes from a curious old MS. history of Kerry (preserved in the Royal Irish Academy and bearing the date about 1698), the writer of which, evidently a Catholic inhabitant of the county, relates the great cruelties practised in Iveragh by Colonel Nelson and Captain Barrington, who, it is alleged, hunted down the native Irish with a large bloodhound which tore and mangled them so frightfully, that for generations the proverbial phrase in Iveragh describing any great misfortune or act of enmity was “as bad as Barrington’s bloodhound to us.”

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