Hitchcock, Richard (1824–56), antiquarian and librarian, was born 6 April 1824 (however, in 1891 his wife reportedly stated he was born in March 1825) at Annagh near Blennerville, Tralee, Co. Kerry, one of three children of Rodney Hitchcock, originally of Spring Vale, Co. Cork. While his parents had initially experienced prosperous circumstances, they were obliged for reasons that are not clear to retire to a small cottage and farm on the foot of Sliabh Mis overlooking Tralee Bay shortly after Hitchcock's birth. It appears that he was largely self-educated apart from a few years spent at an Erasmus Smith school in Blennerville. However, he was an intellectually inquisitive child, and his interest in archaeology and geology was actively encouraged by the local Church of Ireland curate, Arthur Blennerhasset Rowan (qv). Hitchcock read widely in Rowan's library at Belmont on the subjects of Irish history and antiquity, while he also took lessons in drawing from Joseph Coneys, an engineer working on the construction of the Tralee Ship Canal from 1836 to 1845. He quickly developed a gift for accurate architectural drawing.
Hitchcock was appointed a temporary clerk on famine relief schemes organised by the board of works, and his consequent residence in Dingle (1846–8) and the access this provided him to the antiquities of west Kerry was to prove a critical influence in his formation as an antiquarian. Writing later of his sojourn in Dingle, Hitchcock described how he had found in the remote barony of Corca Dhuibhne ‘monuments of almost every age and class, and in a remarkably fine state of preservation . . . The Ogham inscriptions, of which the barony of Corkaguiny contains so many, possessed peculiar attractions for me’ (RIA, MS 24.E.13, p. 1). Hitchcock's correspondence, begun in August 1847 regarding the possible decipherment of Ogham characters, with Edward Clibborn, clerk and assistant librarian of the RIA, drew the attention of the eminent antiquarian Dr Charles Graves (qv), who was then himself engaged in the study of Ogham. Graves commissioned Hitchcock to locate and record Ogham inscriptions on the Dingle peninsula and elsewhere in the south of Ireland. Hitchcock soon became recognised as an authority on the rich archaeological heritage of west Kerry.
Graves introduced Hitchcock to Dr James Henthorn Todd (qv), librarian of TCD, with whose support he acquired a position as library clerk in TCD and as an assistant to the Geological Society of Ireland. Moving to Dublin (April 1848), he eagerly availed himself of bibliographical resources and scholarly counsel unavailable to him in Kerry. He was particularly active in the affairs of the pioneering Kilkenny Archaeological Society and he became a friend of its guiding force, the Rev. James Graves (qv). Hitchcock both contributed material to and actively worked on the production of the Society's Transactions. He also wrote occasionally for A. B. Rowan's short-lived Kerry Magazine (1854–6), signing his work simply as ‘H’. He maintained a regular correspondence with fellow antiquarians throughout Britain and Ireland. Hitchcock's most substantial achievement was undertaken at Charles Graves's commission. However, his comprehensive record of Ogham inscriptions in southern Ireland, which in 1850 he presented to Graves for publication, never appeared in book form (RIA. M. 24.E.13). While Hitchcock was acknowledged for scholarly exactitude, his ignorance of Irish must have severely curtailed his potential as an expert in Ogham (Hitchcock to A. B. Rowan, 1846, 2).
In an anonymous memoir of Hitchcock published in the Kerry Magazine, iii, no. 36 (1856), the author – almost certainly A. B. Rowan – described his late friend and sometime protégé in terms that reveal much of the young antiquarian's personality: ‘With various eccentricities, much of the primitive simplicity, and something of the importance incidental to self-teaching, Richard Hitchcock had high principles, thoroughly disinterested feelings, and an enthusiastic delight in obliging or serving those who had befriended him’ (193). Clearly a man of strong enthusiasms (he was, for instance, a convinced vegetarian), Hitchcock was above all a passionate student of archaeology, particularly that of his native Kerry. He died of TB at his residence in Roundtown (now Terenure), Dublin, on 3 December 1856, both his brother and sister in Kerry having earlier in that year succumbed to the same disease. He was buried at Mount Jerome cemetery, where the provost and fellows of TCD funded a funerary monument inscribed to his memory.
Richard Hitchcock married Mary (d. 1896), daughter of William Fuller (1780–1853) of Ventry, Co. Kerry, and his wife Lucy Mason; there were no children. Hitchcock's early death, allied to modest provincial origins and lack of formal academic training, no doubt combined to obscure his achievements. R. R. Brash, writing in 1879, implied that Hitchcock's memory had all but faded when he declared ‘it his duty to make this brief record of the little known, but invaluable services rendered by Richard Hitchcock to the cause of Irish archaeology’ (The ogam inscribed monuments of the Gaedhil in the British Islands, 55).
Hitchcock's contributions to the Transactions and Proceedings and Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (forerunners of the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland) include ‘Athcarne way-side cross’ (1850); ‘Gleanings from country church-yards’ and ‘Dingle in the sixteenth century’ (1852); ‘Notice of a sculptured stone in the old church of Annagh, county of Kerry’, ‘Notes on the round towers of the county of Kerry’, and ‘Notes made in the archaeological court of the Great Exhibition of 1853’ (1853); and a two-part article on the castles of Corkaguiny (1854–5). He also wrote ‘Caherconree: its history and present state’ for the Kerry Magazine (November 1854), and ‘On an Ogham inscription’ for RIA Proc., vi (1853–7).