School: Morette, Portarlington (roll number 899)
- Location:
- Morett, Co. Laois
- Teacher: Elizabeth Finn
Open data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Morette, Portarlington
- XML Page 207
- XML “The Plain of the Heath - The Heath Races in the Olden Times”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- The Heath races in the olden times
The races have not been held on the Heath for the past fifty years. But before that the races were held regularly yearly. There were large sums of money staked at some of these races, so that trainers brought their horses from the neighbouring counties and sometimes from different counties through out Ireland. The race-goers used to spend the day very enjoyable. But after the races the people who lost their money in backing horses were cranky, and they used to attack those whom they had any spleen against. He would start fighting and the people would back up on their own side. then the people would get very angry with each other and the nearest thing to hand would be pitched at the opposing parties this would lead to a big fight and many people would be wounded, some very seriously. On one occasion a man was known to die from the injuries he received in the- Informant
- Mr Patrick Fitzpatrick
- Gender
- Female
- Address
- Morett, Co. Laois