The "Kilkelly Ireland Song" now a famous ballad, draws its inspiration from a series of ten surviving letters written on behalf of Byran and Elizabeth Hunt by the local school master to their emigrant son in America.
John Hunt emigrated to the States in 1855 and the letters written to him by his parents were re-discovered in an attic in Bethesda Maryland by his American descendants the Jones family. Some 120 years after they were written, Peter Jones a great, great grandson of John Hunt composed the ballad based on the contents of the letters.
It is a poignant song dealing with the effects of Famine, poverty and emigration in one Irish family. However its universal appeal comes from the fact that this could be the saga of countless thousands of other families in the latter part of the 19th century. A dramatisation of the "Kilkelly Ireland" story is available on video tape.
The old cemetery mentioned in the song has been renovated and restored, and a picnic area has been developed close by on the banks of the Trimogue