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Image: © Kenneth Allen Taken: 21 Mar 2011

The following text is included, "To grow up in Kells in the Fifties and Sixties was inevitably to be aware of the local industrial heritage. The landscape from the Ross to Ross's Factory and beyond was dotted with "works" present and past. Central to developments had been the Glenwhirry River which, in this civil parish of Connor, became the Kells Water. As a sense of that industrial history increasingly slips away, the Glenravel sculptor Eamonn Higgins imagines a lean-bodied, rough-handed millworker of the middle 20th century. She is clothed in an apron whose rising texture represents the progress from raw lint to refined linen. From her hair severely restrained by a band to her firmly-planted strapped shoes, she knows a hard daily reality. Yet there is a faraway look in her worn but intelligent face. She stands at an angle to the present, the artist submits, because she is looking back to former days and perhaps a lost love. Her individual retrospect he then sees as a metaphor of a past receding from the communal memory. © Dr.Eull Dunlop Created far Kells and Connor Improvement Committee, this sculpture was funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, through the Re-imaging Art Programme, 2008-9. Eamonn Higgins is an Honours graduate of the University of Lincoln who has been involved in regeneration projects in both England and Northern Ireland" It is located here Image]

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