Lady Eva Mary Margaret Forbes of Granard: The Sporting Life
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Editor's Note: Jonathan, Viscount Forbes, has generously shared with the Clan Forbes Society a selection of photographs, newspaper clippings, race programs, and excerpts from the Sporting Scrapbook of his great-great-aunt, Lady Eva Mary Margaret Forbes of Granard (1877–1968). Compiled during the opening year of the twentieth century, these highlights offer a fascinating glimpse into the equestrian and hunting traditions of what is today the Republic of Ireland, preserving the people, horses, and sporting culture of a remarkable era.
Few surviving sporting scrapbooks preserve the daily life of Ireland's Edwardian hunting world as vividly as that of Lady Eva Mary Margaret Forbes. Compiled during the opening year of the twentieth century, her album records not only horses and hunts but the people, landscapes, and social traditions of a vanished Anglo-Irish society.
Lady Eva Mary Margaret Forbes (1877–1968) was born into one of Ireland’s most prominent aristocratic families, the daughter of George Arthur Hastings Forbes, 7th Earl of Granard, and his second wife, Mary Frances Petre.
Raised between the Forbes seat at Newtownforbes in County Longford and the wider social world of the Anglo-Irish elite, Eva came of age at a moment when hunting was not merely a sport but a defining institution of rural Irish society. Her surviving Sporting Scrapbook, begun in January 1900, offers a vivid window into that world—its horses, its people, and its rituals.
Lady Eva moved in a close-knit circle of Forbes and Bellew relations. Her half-sister Lady Sophia Grattan-Bellew (née Forbes), daughter of the 7th Earl by his first wife Jane Colclough Grogan-Morgan, married into the Bellew family of Mount Bellew, one of the leading Catholic landed dynasties of east Galway. Contemporary hunting reports frequently list Lady Eva and Lady Sophia riding in the same field, their names appearing side by side in the Mount Bellew Harriers and County Galway Hunt, also called the “Blazers” after the distinctive scarlet coats worn by its members.
The scrapbook’s clippings reveal a recurring circle of families who formed the backbone of the Galway hunting country: the Grattan-Bellews, Ffrenches, Shawe-Taylors, Joyces, Blakes, Persses, and McDonnells. These estates—Ballydonnellan, Mount Bellew, Windfield, Roxborough, and others—created a patchwork of pastureland, stone walls, drains, and hedges that demanded courage and skill from both horse and rider. Like most ladies of her generation, Lady Eva hunted side-saddle, requiring extraordinary balance and horsemanship. Hunting in this landscape was a shared enterprise, dependent on the cooperation of landowners and the participation of farmers, officers, and townspeople. Hunting served as one of the principal social institutions of rural Galway.
Lady Eva’s scrapbook preserves more than photographs; it captures the rhythm of a sporting life. Newspaper reports show Lady Eva as an accomplished horsewoman. One dramatic clipping recounts a hunt at Ballydonnellan Castle, where a fox “gave a capital gallop by Cappertagle over the Oatfield double,” before Lady Eva “met with a heavy fall which prevented her continuing the chase.” The fox ultimately escaped “into an open culvert,” but the incident underscores her willingness to ride hard in demanding country.
The scrapbook also includes race programmes from the Mount Bellew Harriers point-to-point (an informal steeplechase races run across open country), where Lady Eva entered her own horses. Her mare Molly, listed in the Light-Weight Hunt Race under her colours of dark blue and straw, appears repeatedly in photographs—sometimes with a groom, sometimes with Eva herself in the saddle.
Another horse, Finn McCoull, is recorded in the programmes and shown in a mounted photograph dated 23 December. Together, the race programmes and photographs transform the names and results preserved on printed race cards into a living record of a young woman immersed in the equestrian culture of her time.
Lady Eva's interest in horses endured well beyond the scrapbook itself. One of her horses, Kilbarry, achieved national fame by winning the Irish Grand National in 1924, a reminder of the continuity between local hunt racing and the major steeplechase events of the early twentieth century.
Lady Eva lived through a period of profound change in Ireland—political upheaval, land reform, and the decline of the great estates. Yet the world preserved in her scrapbook reflects a moment of social cohesion, when the hunt field served as a meeting ground for families whose names had shaped the region for centuries. Her life, recorded in fragments of newsprint and photographs, offers a rare and intimate glimpse into that vanished landscape.
Sporting scrapbooks are among the most revealing surviving records of country-house life because they preserve what official documents seldom record—the friendships, routines, and everyday pleasures that shaped aristocratic society.
More than a century after Lady Eva clipped these newspaper reports and mounted her photographs onto their pages, the scrapbook remains a rare witness to a disappearing world. It preserves not merely the sporting achievements of a gifted horsewoman but the landscape, friendships, and traditions of an Irish hunting community at the height of its vitality. In doing so, Lady Eva Forbes unknowingly left historians an invaluable portrait of rural Ireland at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Learn more here:
Sport Horse Pedigree: Kilbarry: https://sporthorse-data.com/pedigree/kilbarry-1
YouTube Video: 1924 Irish Grand National: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8mXjM717jo
Thoroughbred Heritage: Irish Grand national winners 1870 to 2012: https://www.tbheritage.com/TurfHallmarks/racecharts/Steeplechase/IrishGrandNational.html
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