Guillemot's Egg from the Skelligs

"I purchased this in 1999 from an Antique Dealer in Cork. It came from a Victorian house in Cork. It's just one of three hundred eggs in my collection. Wealthy industrialists would come over from England and they'd go to the wild places and collect eggs from the birds that were extinct in England. They'd collect them and bring them back and keep them on view in the parlours. They were an object of beauty and scientific interest. We grew up as children collecting eggs around Fermoy. I used to collect as a kid and have published a couple books on the subject. Before televisions came along, it would be a favourite pastime among the town lads like me, collecting eggs. We'd go out every day in the summer holidays We'd generally only take one egg from a nest, that was an unwritten rule. But sometimes if none of us had the egg and there just a clutch of a few eggs we'd be fighting over who would get the egg."