Read about the Irish island where Agatha Christie penned her first Poirot novel; what’s ‘off’ about Big Ben’s chimes; the European warrior who died of a nose bleed and more …

n Jane Hook of Belfast – then aged 112 had, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine of July 1731, ‘lately all her old stumps drove out by a new set of teeth’.

n A County Donegal notice in the 1920s warned people against touching wires in the vicinity of an electrical station: ‘Beware – to touch these wires is instant death – anyone found doing so will be prosecuted’.

n Newgrange, built some 3200 years B.C. predates both Gisa’s Great Pyramids and Stonehenge.

n George Bernard Shaw has the unique honour of winning both a Nobel Prize for Literature (St. Joan, 1925) and an Academy Award (Best Screenplay, Pygmalion (1938). Suffice to say, he was not enamoured with his Nobel Award.

n Mrs Darby Mullins was ever reminding her pirate husband he would die with his boots on. A moment before the scaffold claimed him in 1701, he pulled them off and threw them into the crowd – just to prove her wrong ….

n Fifty-six-year-old John Delaney was strolling past a partially-completed building in Birmingham when a large coping stone – estimated to weigh close to a hundredweight – landed on his unprotected head. He was expected to succumb to horrific brain damage. Not so! The following day he complained to his hospital nurse, “I’ve got a bit of a headache!”

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own