Last Irish chase of the season

Today my search for places with cultural connections in Ireland led me to ‘The Laurels’ a comparatively recently abandoned house located a short distance to the far side of Glenties from the cottage in which I have been staying this week.  ‘The Laurels’ was the home of playwright Brian Friel’s maternal grandparents where, with his  two sisters, the young Brian spent most of his childhood summer holidays.  As recently as 1998 when, I understand, it was used as one of several locations in the area for the shooting of Pat O'Connor’s excellent film of Friel’s play, “Dancing at Lughnasa”, the house must have been in a better condition than that in which I found it today.  Indeed, although it is but a stone’s throw beyond the village, lost in its overgrown garden the house was far from easy to find.  ‘Ballybeg’, the fictional village in which several of Friel’s plays are set, is based on Glenties.
I also visited Glenties museum, a wonderfully eclectic gathering on three floors, of artifacts, photographs and newspaper clippings telling stories of life and events in and around Glenties through, largely, the past couple of hundred years.  I particularly enjoyed discovering, in a display of genuine items arranged to feign an early twentieth century kitchen, three of the silk stockings Meryl Streep had worn while filming “Dancing at Lughnasa”, hanging from a line above the kitchen range.  The logic of why there should be three stockings rather than a pair or any number of pairs caused me more than a little head scratching!

Mount Vernon

Strolling along the track beside the ‘Flaggy Shore’ at the edge of the Burren I noticed amongst the  usual gathering of utilitarian sea-side villas an older, more interesting building.  Hoping to learn more about it I took a few snapshots.  My casual interest has been well rewarded.

Mount Vernon was built in 1788 for Colonel William Persse, a friend of John Wesley and George Washington who is reputed to have sent seed or plants for the fine trees yet living in the garden.  Persse named his new house after Washington’s Virginia home.

Later the house was owned by Sir Hugh Lane who, in 1908, established Dublin’s first public gallery of modern art.  When Sir Hugh, a passenger on the ill-fated Lusitania (Torpedoed by a german submarine in May 1915.),  drowned the house passed to his aunt, Lady Augusta Gregory a leading light of Ireland’s cultural renaissance and confidante of George Russell (AE), J. M. Synge, G. B. Shaw and W. B. Yeats.  Lady Augusta gave the house to her artist son, Robert, who was killed while serving with the RFC in France.  Yeats’ poem “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” has immortalised the event.

        An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

        I know that I shall meet my fate
        Somewhere among the clouds above;
        Those that I fight I do not hate,
        Those that I guard I do not love;
        My country is Kiltartan Cross,
        My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
        No likely end could bring them loss
        Or leave them happier than before.
        Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
        Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
        A lonely impulse of delight
        Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
        I balanced all, brought all to mind,
        The years to come seemed waste of breath,
        A waste of breath the years behind
        In balance with this life, this death.

The house is now run as a country house style B&B which I have investigated through trip advisor.  From what I have read there particularly the negative comments which say rather more about the disgruntled guests than they do about Mount Vernon, I believe I might enjoy a few days stay at there when I next visit Ireland.

Glenties

Somewhere in the distance is the small town of Glenties, home village of author and dramatist Brian Friel considered, by many who are qualified to judge these things, to be the greatest of living playwrights writing in English.  Glenties has been identified as the model for Friel’s frequently employed fictional, Ballybeg (from the Irish, Baile Beag, which translates into English as "Little Town").  The environs of Glenties were also used to great advantage as a location by Pat O’Connor when he made his beautiful 1998 film based on Friel’s play, “Dancing at Lughnasa”, which starred Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon.

Also in the distance, a couple of kilometers nearer than Glenties, is the cottage I have rented for this week.

In pursuit of John McGahern

The Barracks, Cootehall

Aghawillian School

The first stop on a drive into Counties Roscommon and Leitrim in pursuit of John McGahern was at Cootehall, where lived McGahern’s father, an  ex-IRA senior officer rewarded, post civil-war, with the position of senior police officer at a quiet and peaceful country village Garda Barracks (Police Station).  When young John was but ten years old his mother, with whom hitherto he and his siblings had been living on a nearby smallholding, died.  Thereafter the children were obliged to share their domineering father’s private quarters at the Barracks.  The two-storey late eighteenth century building, nestling beside the river Boyle was probably built originally to accommodate a British army guard.  Presently it is a private house.  While there I photographed the house and the lake behind it onto which the young John McGahern would row the Barracks’ boat to read in peace the books which were his escape from the tyranny of life at home.  On the road in front of the Barracks McGahern’s family have had erected a memorial to him. It bears words from the book:  “. . . . a white moon rested on the water, there was no wind, the stars in their places were clear and fixed.  Who would want change since change will come without wanting?  Who this night would not want to live?”

McGahern's grave in St Patrick's Churchyard

If his life at Cootehall barracks provided McGahern inspiration and material for his first novel, “The Barracks”,  Augawillan, where he spent his first happy years with his siblings and his mother, similarly influenced, “Amongst Women”.  So graphic are McGahern’s descriptions of walks up the hill from home to the village school at which his mother taught that, to be there, in the village, on the tree-lined hill outside the school (now also converted into a private house, the school having been moved to a new, larger, building lower down the hill.) invoked in me a strong sensation of déjà vu.  Before leaving Aughawillan I visited St Patrick’s Church to pay respect to McGahern at his grave, which he shares with his mother, and to give silent thanks for the immense pleasure he has posthumously given to me through his writing.

McGahern’s last novel, “To Face the Rising Sun”, follows the lives of a group of people who have in common  the lake which their homes either overlook or of which they are within a stone’s throw.  John McGahern eventually settled in a house on the shores of Laura Lough near Fenagh, County Leitrim.  The narrator of “To Face the Rising Sun” also moved from the city to live tranquilly on the shore of a lake.  Although the Loch is not identified in the book there is more than enough circumstantial evidence within the narrative to suggest that Lough Laura had considerable influence on its geography.

Laura Lough near Fenagh

A Search for Oscar

Yesterday drove to Cong, best known as the location of the Hollywood (John Wayne) version of Maurice Walsh’s short story, “The Quiet Man” but, of far more interest to me, the surroundings of Cong are also the location of two homes of Oscar Wilde’s ancestry.  First I went in search of the ruins of Ballymagibbon House, eighteenth century home of Wilde’s Flynn ancestors.  The site of the ruin is far and hidden from a narrow lane by impenetrable woodland edged by bog so I abandoned the chase and drove on in search of a compensatory lunch.  Along the way I unexpectedly sighted, on a distant ridge, the second of my quarries; ‘Moytura’  the house Wilde’s father had built as a bolt hole from Dublin and in which Oscar spent many of his childhood holidays.  (Often spending time, apparently, with George Moore and his siblings.)

Moore House

Moore House, was the ancestral home and birthplace of the Irish artist and writer George Moore (b.1852 - d1933).  These days Moore is most remembered for his 1894 novel, ‘Esther Waters’, a critical  social commentary of the horrendous plight of abandoned single mothers in his day.   Moore had originally intended for himself a career as an artist  and went to Paris to further that ambition.  There he met Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Daudet, Mallarmé, Turgenev and, above all, Zola, under whose influence Moore dropped painting for writing.

The ruined, burned out shell of Moore House is presently hidden within a forestry company’s plantation.  Even in its poignantly sad decrepitude there is enough left of the building, today the protected home of a colony of Horseshoe Bats, to easily imagine how grand it might have been in its heyday but Moore House is but one of Ireland’s abundance of these sad ruins.  The building was destroyed by fire in 1922, towards the end of the civil war, by the IRA who believed Moore’s brother to be a pro-treatyist.  Ironically, it was the IRA who, in 1964, had a memorial plaque raised beside the road opposite the ruins of Moore Hall lauding the family for their famine relief work and for their ‘refusal to barter their principles for English gold’!

Irish wit on a notice on the wall of the ruin.