Reginald Clare Hart

Scarriff, County Clare, is the birthplace of Reginald Clare Hart, who joined the Royal Engineers and later received the Victoria Cross for rescuing a wounded soldier in Afghanistan. The small Irish town gave birth to a man who carried a rifle into fatal danger and emerged as a celebrated general. Hart lived to eighty-three, dying in Bournemouth in 1931, but the dangerous riverbed where he first ran toward another person remains the sharpest marker of his life.