Old Parish: Notes on Hurling

Ciarán Murphy

Old Parish: Notes on Hurling

€16.99 €21.24 RRP
20% Off
SKU: 9781844886890

This item is available for PRE-ORDER only and will not be dispatched until official release date.
Please note: Regular and Pre-order items cannot be purchased at the same time. These will need to be ordered separately.

Release Date: 2025-09-18
Quantity:
Free, fast & tracked delivery over €10 Free, fast & tracked delivery over €10
Ireland's best value books. Why pay more? Ireland's best value books. Why pay more?
Same great price online and in-store Same great price online and in-store
Proudly Irish and family-run since 1989 Proudly Irish and family-run since 1989

Hurling is Ireland’s national game – a source of fascination and pride, even to people who have never played it. Ciarán Murphy, a lifelong club footballer, used to be one of those people. Then he spent a summer trying to play hurling with a tiny club in the West Waterford Gaeltacht. Along the way he embarked on a quest to understand the history, geography and mystique of this extraordinary sport.

Old Parish is the club of Ciarán’s father, a club where relatives of his are still deeply involved, and possibly the only place brave (or stupid) enough to take on a forty-one-year-old newcomer to the game. Predictably (and at times hilariously), Ciarán finds out just how difficult a sport hurling is to pick up when you’re in your sporting dotage, up against men who’ve played it since childhood.

Ciarán also explores why hurling is played in only half the country; he investigates the origins of hurling clubs’ antipathy to football and the difficulties of establishing hurling in new areas; he looks into the mysteries of hurley-making; and he seeks to understand why, when a hurling legend refers to the sport as ‘the greatest game ever played by any man’, he has to be taken seriously.

Anyone who has ever watched hurling knows that it is something unique and extraordinary. Old Parish explains why.