"washing up is usually done in a bucket". Regular visitors to his home in Belfast, Ardrigh House number 737b on Antrim Road, were Douglas Hyde, Roger Casement, and Francis McPeake. Casement often stayed with him when in Belfast. Bigger arranged lessons for McPeake in Irish traditional pipe music from John O'Reilly of Galway, paying for the Belfast lodgings of McPeake and O'Reilly, and giving additional money to O'Reilly's family. There is a long list of such visitors most of them Republicans and early separatists, known as the "Ardrigh coterie", including Stephen Gwynn, Padraic Colum, Anna Johnston, and Alice Milligan, and Captain Jack White, who with Casement in 1913 addressed a unique Protestant Home Rule meeting in Ballymoney. A description of Ardrigh House can be found in chapter 4 of Joseph Connolly's Memoirs, , listed in further reading. Bigger himself spelled the house's name "Airdrie" in correspondence; it was demolished in 1986 in order to build a block of flats. Bigger was the patron, and first president, of the Ulster Literary Theatre that was founded by in 1902 by another Belfast Gaelic Leaguer, Bulmer Hobson. This patronage extended to financing the theatre's journal, which was named Uladh (the word for Ulster in Irish), and writing an article, "Art and Culture in Old Belfast", for its first issue in 1904. Bigger financed Songs of Uladh by another of his visitors, Herbert Hughes. The book was published in 1904, the result of a holiday to Donegal taken by Bigger, who brought along Hughes and the two brothers John Patrick Campbell and Joseph Campbell. Hughes noted down the melodies of various folk songs during the holiday, which were then published in the Songs with words by Joseph and illustrative woodcuts by John. Bigger strove to improve the standards of public houses, founding the Ulster Public House Association (a.k.a. the Ulster Public House Trust or Ulster Public House Reform Association). For his contributions to local history and archeology, Queen's University Belfast awarded him a master's degree in 1926. He died at home in 1926. Works A strong supporter of the revival of Irish language and culture, he wrote on those and many aspects of the archaeology of Northern Ireland. His best-known work is The Ulster Land War of 1770, and he also edited and contributed numerous articles to Ulster Journal of Archaeology. Other works include his booklet The Hills of Holy Ireland, a diatribe against