A SECRET MAP OF IRELAND
Rosita Boland was born in Clare. She has published two books of poetry, Dissecting the Heart (Gallery Press, 2003) and Muscle Creek (Raven Arts Press, 1991), and the non-fiction Sea Legs – Hitch-hiking the Coast of Ireland Alone (New Island Books, 1992). Her poems are in several anthologies, including The Field Day Anthology of Irish
INTRODUCTION
The first map I ever owned was The Educational School Map of Ireland, which we all had to buy in fourth class when I was nine. I think it cost sixpence. The counties were different colours – pink, green, yellow, orange – the various colours assigned to counties seemingly at random. I never worked out why the counties were the colours they were. They were not, for instance, colour-coded by province. Armagh was green, but so too were Limerick,
Roscommon, Waterford, Dublin and Carlow. Clare, my own county, was yellow.
I studied the map constantly, utterly fascinated by it. For a small map, it packed in a lot of detail. A thick red line showed the railways. Crossed swords showed the sites of battles: Vinegar Hill, Cnocnanos, Ballineety, Aughrim, Carrickshok, Clontibret. Small crosses marked historical sites: Ardmore, Clonfert, Gartan, Bunratty, Monasterboice. Names and heights of mountains were printed in tiny black type: Carntuohill 3414, Devils Bit 1583, Lognacoille 3047, Cruagh Patrick 2518, Sl Donard 2790. There were no roads marked on it at all. Instead, there were rivers snaking everywhere: R Liffey, R Blackwater, R Bann, R Robe, Fergus R, R Shannon, R Derg.
The bays and lochs were all marked in, as were many of the islands. The cities, county capitals, towns and villages were almost like afterthoughts, small pinpricks of red against all those rivers, mountains, battle sites, historical sites, which took up most of the space. Shannon, then a new town in the making, was not on the map at all.
Broken red lines led into Waterville and Valentia: Trans-Atlantic Cables. Sea routes were thin red lines. There were twenty-four of them then. Cobh to New York 2800m, Waterford to London 215m, Dublin to Liverpool 120m, Greenore to Holyhead 70m, Belfast
to Glasgow 113m, Moville to New York 2560m, Larne to Stranraer 35m.
I still have that map of Ireland, along with several others I’ve acquired in the meantime. I like the fact that, like palimpsests, maps can contain anything: that one map of the same country can exist without showing you roads, and that another one is thick with roads. That one version can show you historical sites, and another only race-courses. I also like the simple but satisfying fact that, if you have been to a certain county, it means something different to you; you have a first-hand, three-dimensional experience of it. It becomes real in a way it didn’t before.
Ireland is a country that is sentimentalised by virtually everyone except those who actually live in it. Here’s the best example I can think of. Litter. The Irish, it has always seemed to me, are genetically programmed to litter. RTÉ journalist Valerie Cox did several reports about illegally dumped rubbish recently for the Today with Pat Kenny Show, going out on the road with litter wardens. In rural Sligo, they found a huge pile of half-burned rubbish in a scenic public amenity. The litter warden found an address in the mess and duly confronted the man who had dumped it there. When asked by Cox what this man’s partner would say if she knew that he had burnt all this litter in a wooded picnic area, he said, “She’d kill me.” When Cox asked him why he had done it, he
simply replied several times, “I don’t know.” The thing is: he did sound genuinely baffled, as if he really had no clue at all what had prompted him to think that it would be an excellent idea to go to a local beauty spot and burn his unwanted rubbish.
So that’s part of what Ireland is. It’s there, the elephant in the corner, along with political corruption, drugs, racism, tribunals, a new culture of commuting, planning disasters, materialism, obsession with property, celebrity and the quite staggering fact (to me, anyway) that Brown Thomas now offers a bespoke Hermes bag made of crocodile skin and diamonds that sells for €120,000. All those things are now an integral part of the Ireland we live in. But they weren’t what I wanted to focus on when writing this book.
I wanted to write a book that attempted to show that you can be surprised by your own place. Undoubtedly, many people who read this book will know the things I have written about inside-out. But prior to researching this book, I had never heard of the Seven Wonders of Fore at Westmeath. Or Dan Donnelly’s arm in Kildare. Or explorer Thomas Heazle Parke, buried in Drumsna, Leitrim. Or Billy Dunbar’s museum in Tyrone. Or the lost village at Ballyvaston in Down. Or the Fuldiew Stone in Antrim. Local people in those counties will probably know all those names and places intimately. I suppose
my thinking was that you can’t be a local in every county, so hopefully there are at least a few surprises for everyone.
Knowing a county well made little difference to what I chose to write about. Kerry, for instance, where my father is from, where my brother David now lives, where I once lived myself and which is a county I have known extremely well all my life, was almost the last place to yield up what seemed like the right idea. Similarly, I dithered for a long time about Clare, my home county. In the end, I chose subjects purely because they either meant something to me or intrigued me, thus I really wanted to research and write about them. Selection was as simple as that. Anyone could write a book like this one, and each one would be completely different because everyone would focus on different subjects, chart their own individual map.
The other criterion I set myself was that everything I wrote about was to be accessible in some way to the general public. Almost everything is. Anyone can go hunting for the route of the old West Clare Railway; or stay a night in Mount Melleray in Waterford; or visit the Chinese Room at Dalgan Park in Meath; or look at where T’aint-a-Bird landed in Cork; or visit the Folklore Library in Dublin; or ask for the key to Robert Percy ffrench’s mausoleum. There are a few exceptions: I was invited to Inishlyre in Mayo by the
islanders and invited to visit the Met Station at Malin Head in Donegal – invitations I accepted because I thought they would cast light on the bigger associated subjects I wanted to write about. But in the main, most things covered in this book are places anyone can go, should they want.
I put the chapters in the order that I visited the counties in, mainly because there are various references to weather through the year’s research that give them a kind of natural unity as a whole. But the book can be read in any direction: probably the chapter everyone will read first will be of the county they are from. The idea is that the thirty-two chapters make a kind of jigsaw: that the various pieces all add up to make a picture of Ireland as I see it. My own customised treasure map, I guess.
When I started researching this book, in May 2004, I thought I already knew Ireland pretty well. I was completely wrong. Long before I had finished the research, I realised I didn’t know it at all. That the more closely you look at something, the bigger and more complex and more densely textured it becomes. To me, the biggest and best surprise about writing this book was realising I will continually be surprised by Ireland.
Dublin, May 2005
GALWAY
A KEY
In Ireland, we grow up wonderfully used to taking castles for granted. Not just the posh ones that are now hotels, such as Ashford and Dromoland, or the pristinely restored ones you pay to visit, like Bunratty and Knappogue, but also the ruined ones. The bits and pieces that turn up all over the country; stone flotsam and jetsam from a tide long gone out forever. The huge slabs of walls at right angles to each other. The still-stark outlines of Norman towers. The fields with those roofless, floorless, soaring spaces; the walls thick as memory. The ruins we find familiar, and thus not remarkable. They are one of the more exotic things we take for granted about rural Ireland. The sheep and cows of Ireland really do graze in pretty astonishing surroundings.
I heard about a mausoleum in Monivea Woods twelve years before I discovered that it was in a building that looked like a miniature castle. My sister, CáitrÃona, lives in north Galway, not very far from Monivea, to where she sometimes used to drive my niece Sarah to discos. I asked CáitrÃona if she knew of
a mausoleum somewhere in Monivea Woods. She had never heard of it. Monivea is very small. You would think that if there were something special there, someone who lived reasonably locally and was interested in these things anyway would have heard of it. I was not even sure what information I had originally picked up about the tomb, in the faintly remembered Chinese-whispers way that you hear things.
In the end, it was simple: I looked it up on the Internet. It took less than a minute to find out that there was indeed a mausoleum still standing in Monivea. It sounded both impossibly extravagant and impossibly romantic.
The mausoleum at Monivea was built for Robert Percy ffrench, the last of the male line of his family. Their estate was the village’s Big House, Monivea Castle, now ruined. ffrench was a diplomat and served as secretary to the British Embassy in St Petersburg and Vienna. On his travels, he met Sophia de Kindiakoff, the only child of fabulously wealthy Russian aristocratic landowners. They married in 1862.
They themselves had one child: a daughter, Kathleen. By the time her father died in Italy in 1896, she was one of the richest women in Russia, where she was then living. Not only had she inherited the estate at Monivea, she had also inherited all the
Russian estates belonging to her mother’s side of the family. Kathleen Emily Alexandra de Kindiakoff ffrench lived at Simbirsk on the Volga in what was described as “the largest of her palaces” until all her property was confiscated by the Soviet government after the Russian Revolution.
Meanwhile, after her father died in Naples in April 1896, his body lay embalmed there while Kathleen commissioned a tomb worthy of his memory. Designed by Francis Persse, the younger brother of Augusta Gregory, it took four years to complete. Kathleen’s fortune explains the cost of the extraordinary commission – the equivalent of €2 million in today’s money. The triple-lancet stained-glass windows, by Mayers of Munich (still in business today), were valued in the early 1990s at a million pounds alone.
One Saturday in May, I met my sister CáitrÃona, niece Lucy, who had just turned nine, and five-year-old nephew Luke in Monivea. The wide-streeted village still has the irregular green patches that were once flax beds; the industry that supported Monivea in ffrench’s time. Together, we went looking for the house near the entrance to the woods that holds the key to the mausoleum. It is not the first house or the one closest to the entrance of the domain, and there is nothing to indicate where the keyholders live. You find out by asking in the village – although, in the
Irish way, you must first know what it is you are looking for.
The key we collected was a magnificent object. It was as long as Luke’s forearm; a huge, heavy old iron key. The children took turns carrying it, thrilled by its size. I was pretty thrilled myself. At one point, Lucy dropped it. What we would do if you lost it, we teased her. But that can’t be the only key, CáitrÃona said. When we returned it later, we discovered that it was. There is only the one, original key to open Robert Percy ffrench’s mausoleum, which you borrow from the keyholders for no fee and without even giving your name. I both loved and worried about the freedom of that trust.
We walked through Monivea’s lovely woods for about half an hour, following an unmarked path through the dense forest. We were not quite sure which direction we should be walking in, and there was nobody around to ask. The children panted in the hot, still afternoon and asked how much further, but we didn’t know.
The first sighting you get of the mausoleum is through a clearing in the trees. It is pure Hans Christian Andersen: a miniature castle hidden deep in the woods. It’s the kind of castle you draw as a child: square and simple, with steps leading up to a gothic arched door and crenellations on the roof. There are no windows on the facing wall. We hurried towards
it. Lucy clutched the key and ran ahead of us, her brother trying his best to keep up.
When we turned the key and pushed in the door, all four of us gave involuntary gasps. The children squawked with delicious fear. They seemed both freaked out and enthralled, in equal measure. They stood behind us while we went into a dense and beautiful silence.
The afternoon sun was at our backs. When we opened the door, the strong, bright light fell inwards and onto the effigy in the middle of the room. The life-sized effigy of Robert Percy ffrench is apparently a perfect likeness. His bearded, dignified face is inclined sideways on a marble pillow. He lies on his back, feet to the door and the forest beyond, draped in a richly carved cloth with a Maltese cross on it. He had converted to Catholicism and become a Knight of St John of Jerusalem; the order use this cross as their symbol. The entire effigy is carved from Carrara marble – the marble Michelangelo carved the Pietá from. Canova used it too. It is a pure white marble, from a famous old quarry in Tuscany, still quarried to this day. Its special quality is that it glows translucent when the light shines through it; almost in the way you can hold your hand in front of strong light and see the shadows of the bones within. Infused with sunlight, the effigy looked eerily alive. It was this quality that startled us all when we opened the door first.
This piece of carving by Terace is one of the loveliest I’ve ever seen, all the more startling for being in such an unexpected location. The genius is not just in the carving, but also in the positioning. On the wall opposite the door are the east-facing triple-lancet stained-glass windows; the morning light shines in through here. On a sunny afternoon, such as the one when we were there, the sun is in the west and ignites the marble with light when the door is opened. There is no electricity in the mausoleum, so the use of natural light remains as effective as it was a hundred years ago, when Kathleen de Kindiakoff ffrench commissioned it.
The building itself is perfect, in pristine condition; a place exactly in tune with what it contains; and a beautiful piece of architecture by any standards. It is in every way extraordinary. You could not call it a folly, because it is both beautiful in itself and serves the specific purpose of being a funerary chapel.
It also feels very peaceful, as ideally the final resting place of a person should. The mausoleum-cum-funeral-chapel is small and square, with a high vaulted ceiling of granite gothic arches. Four black marble columns mark each corner of the effigy. There is the distinctive smell of an enclosed place; a place that doesn’t often have air – or people – circulating through it. On the side of Robert Percy ffrench’s
effigy is carved: Il lui sera beaucoup pardonne car il a beaucoup aime. He will be forgiven much because he has loved much.
We left the door wide open and explored further. Under the windows facing the door is an altar, with another Maltese cross carved into it. There were two candlesticks with half-burnt candles in them. I discovered later that Monivea Wood was acquired by the State in 1941. The forest is owned by Coillte, and the mausoleum itself is now owned by the Church of Ireland, who occasionally have services there. On the other two facing walls are more stained-glass windows, which depict twelve of the fourteen Tribes of Galway. There is also an exquisite, tiny holy-water font, composed of waves of the sea, stars and angels’ wings.
There is a door on the left-hand side of the altar chancel. We pushed it cautiously. It opened. Beyond lay a spiral staircase, which led both up and down. We decided to go down first. The children pushed ahead of us, and then hung back some steps down, pressing themselves against the walls so we could pass by them to the basement, where it was very dim. We waited a few seconds for our eyes to adjust. “What,” CáitrÃona said, “is that?” pointing to the two shapes that lay facing east.
In the basement of mausoleum are the two lead coffins of Robert Percy ffrench and his daughter
Kathleen herself died in China in 1938; in Harbin, far north-east China, infamous for being one of the coldest places in China, where the temperature drops to forty degrees below every year. These days, the people of Harbin make ice-sculptures each winter to attract visitors. The biggest ones are several metres high and constructed around lampposts, which make them glow eerily from within – like Robert Percy ffrench’s effigy in sunlight. It was strange thinking of such coldness on what turned out to be one of the hottest days of the summer.
Kathleen was the last of her line: she had no children. We walked around the coffins in the faint light. Kathleen’s is on the left and her father’s on the right. His stands on a carved stone, the letters of which are faintly visible: as if the coffin was intended for a vault that was never built. Between the two coffins is a small white marble cross, with a beautiful wreath of fragile jewelled flowers over it. The children were confused. They had thought the dead person was upstairs, and that there was only one person. “Is he dead?” they had kept asking, walking round the effigy. They recovered their nerve swiftly and scampered upstairs again. When we emerged from the basement, we found them sitting either side of the effigy, patting the head delicately and chattering away unselfconsciously to him.
The other part of the stone spiral stairs leads up to the roof. There is a fine view far out over the forest, all of which was once the ffrench estate. We could see nothing but the trees, hear nothing. The whole experience, I thought later, was like opening a series of Chinese boxes: the wood in the village; the miniature castle in the wood; the marble effigy in the castle, luminous and ethereal as a trapped star, should such a thing ever exist. The key that opened them all.
Months later, curious, I asked Lucy if she remembered the day we went to Monivea. “Oh, that was when we went to see Percy in the forest,” she said brightly. “The dead man lying on the floor. He was nice. I think he gets lonely at night, though.”
Monivea, Co. Galway, 29 May 2004
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