"They also play at long bullets, a game much practised by the weavers. When they intend amusing themselves, they assemble in great numbers, and select for the scene of action the most level roads. The ball is of lead, and it weighs six pounds; he who hurls it the greatest distance in the fewest throws, making it roll along the road, is declared victor".

Thus was the game of road bowls described by W. Wakeman in 1812, and painted by Cork artist Daniel MacDonald in 1847. MacDonald was son of a local painter James McDaniel. The young artist painted local sporting events, faction fights and other entertainments of the Irish countryside. He made delightful sketches of the hedge-school master with his quill pen, the dancing master with his pumps flying, and the red-coated gentlemen of the South Union Hunt on horseback. He also painted one of the only canvases to depict the Famine in Ireland, The Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store, exhibited in London in 1847.

MacDonald is one of the few Irish artists of the nineteenth century who depicted country people without excessive sentimentalising or idealising. His painting showing rival scions of two prominent local families battling it out at a game of road bowls, was exhibited at the second Art Union exhibition in Cork in 1842.

Abraham Morris, shown bowling, was a wealthy Cork merchant and a keen yachtsman. The Morris family built Dunkathel House at Glanmire in the late eighteenth century. His opponent in the bowling match was a member of the Longfield family of Castle Mary in Cloyne. The dolmen depicted in the painting would relate to an actual dolmen on the Castle Mary estate, but otherwise the landscape depicted in the painting is quite fanciful, and neither the hills nor the picturesque river exist in anything other than the painter's imagination. The game of bowling in Ireland goes back many centuries, and is traditionally associated with the weaving trade, so it is not surprising that bowling is most commonly found in counties Cork, Waterford and Armagh, the three areas of Ireland where weavers from England were settled in an attempt to establish an indigenous textile industry. The game is also known as 'Long-Bullets'. It is still a popular sport in present-day Cork.