Old Parish

Description

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 hurleymaking; 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.