“Christina asked me what my last wish was and I said it was to finish the garden and put the NM Cummins letter inside it.” When John Kelly thought he was dying, his thoughts turned to the garden on his home in West Cork and what he was developing there. On this headland outside Union Hall, a local Justice of the Peace, NM Cummins had visited in 1846 and he wrote a letter to the Duke of Wellington, describing what he saw there. “I approached in horror,” he wrote, “and found by a low moaning they were alive, they were…

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