Round Ireland in Low Gear (14 page)

Cork, in parts like a Dutch city before they filled in the Zuider Zee, had a sad feeling about it; something to do with the weather, no doubt, but more perhaps to do with the horrors that were perpetrated in it during the Troubles: vile, senseless murders committed by both sides, including that of the Lord Mayor of Cork, an ardent supporter of Sinn Fein, all culminating in the burning down by the Black and Tans on 12 December 1920 of a large part of the eastern, downstream part of the city, for which they made use of hundreds of gallons of petrol taken by connivance from military depots, and in the course of which the Carnegie Library and a large part of the shopping area was destroyed.

One of the nicest but not the warmest places in Cork in winter is the covered English Market which lies between St Patrick Street, Grand Parade and Oliver Plunket Street. Both St Patrick Street, which was one of the first to be set ablaze by the Black and Tans, and Grand Parade were created in the eighteenth century by filling in a channel of the river Lee, so that shoppers now shop where ships formerly tied up alongside quays. Unfortunately, what was architecturally the finest part of the market had been recently
destroyed by fire; the last of a series of misfortunes that has dogged Cork since its beginnings.

It all started off sedately enough in 600 AD when one of the islands in the river (the
corcaigh
, or marshy place, from which the city took its name) was selected as the site of a monastery by St Finbarr, the son of a master metal worker to a Prince Tigherach. Finbarr had already founded another monastery on an island in the lake of Gougane Barra, at the feet of the Sheehy Mountains in West Cork. By the end of the ninth century the monastery and the town that had grown up round it had become such a popular target for raiding parties of Norsemen that in 917 a band of them decided to settle there, so as to be nearer to their work, as it were, and they themselves eventually became Christianized.

When Henry II arrived on the scene Cork was ruled by Dermot MacCarthy, who unwisely submitted to him and immediately found himself out on the streets. In 1378 the Irish set fire to the city, by which time it had been an English possession for some ninety years or more.

Cork always had a predilection for supporting revolt, but almost invariably chose to support the wrong side, often with dire consequences. One such example was Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the English throne in the reign of Henry VII. In 1497 he sailed from Cork to Cornwall, where he proclaimed himself King as Richard IV; he was hanged at Tyburn two years later, having made a thorough nuisance of himself, together with the Mayor of Cork, who had been silly enough to conspire with him, and the town lost its charter. It also supported Charles I during the Civil War and was taken by Cromwell’s forces. In 1689 it welcomed James II and victualled his forces before his departure for the North where he was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne. In recognition of this assistance John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough and William’s commander-in-chief in England, took Cork and Kinsale,
and Cork was set fire to once more and its walls and fortifications destroyed. In the civil war which followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Cork was the only city occupied by the Republicans, the anti-Treaty members of the IRA, and that, too, was lost to them when units of the Sinn Fein Free State Army under Michael Collins and a couple of generals landed at Passage West in the narrows north of Cork Harbour and took the city without much trouble.

In spite of all this, which would have floored a less resilient lot of people for evermore, the shoppers in what remained of the English Market seemed full of fight, milling around a fountain ornamented with cast iron pelicans, and nattering away at the butchers in their brightly lit stalls who were doing big business in what their placards described as ‘bodice of beef’, and drisheen. Drisheen, the black pudding I had been given at Arbutus Lodge for breakfast, is larger in diameter than most other black puddings, and used to be made with sheep’s blood (in Tipperary they used turkey or goose blood, and the results were said to be spectacular), breadcrumbs or oatmeal, pepper, a pinch of mace and a sprig of tansy. Now it is usually made with pig’s blood and liver and thyme. Cork men and women apparently never forget the pleasure of eating drisheen and many of them return from wherever they may be in exile for the pleasure of tasting it again.

And so we said goodbye to Cork; true we had not seen much of it, but we both felt that we had been able to absorb some of the
genius loci
of the place, which in my case was assisted by having absorbed two memorable pints of Murphy’s stout. Brewed in Cork, Murphy’s is different from Guinness, more velvety, and a taste for either, if over-indulged, can lead to smiles all round for the shareholders and for the consumer a dramatic change of profile and/ or a visit to the bankruptcy court.

Since we now had a van surplus to our requirements, we set off northwards to see some of the places that would have been impossible to see had we been on bicycle, with limited time and energy at our disposal. The first was Lismore, a vast, now largely Victorian castle, high on a rock above a narrow bridge spanning the river Blackwater, which looked nice in the rain.

The castle was originally built while he was Governor of Ireland by Prince John, son of Henry II and later himself King of England from 1199–1216. He was a most unpleasant fellow, unpopular with almost everybody in the country – with the indigenous Irish for his insolent manners (he used to pull their beards and encouraged his sycophants to do the same) and equally unpopular with his mercenary soldiers because he spent what was intended to be their pay. No one shed a tear when he died of dysentery, having just lost his treasury in the Wash.

Later the castle became the property of Sir Walter Raleigh but he could not afford to keep it up so he sold this and his other extensive Irish possessions, which he had come by in pretty dubious circumstances, for a paltry sum
²⁴
to Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, an Englishman of indefatigable deviousness, known to some as ‘The Great Earl’ and to others, less admiring, as ‘That
******* Earl’. One of the Earl’s sons was Robert Boyle, known as ‘the father of chemistry’ and propounder in 1662 of Boyle’s Law, by which he was able to prove, experimentally, that the pressure and volume of a gas are inversely proportional.

By the marriage of the fourth Duke of Devonshire to a Boyle in 1753 the castle passed to the Devonshires. On succeeding to the title in 1811 the sixth Duke, known subsequently as ‘the Bachelor Duke’, commissioned William Atkinson to restore in the mediaeval manner that part of the castle which overhung the river. The Duke entrusted further work to Joseph Paxton, who had been Superintendent of the gardens and woods at Chatsworth, the ducal seat of the Devonshires in Derbyshire, and who had by this time become a personal friend of the Duke, whom he had accompanied on his extensive travels in Europe and Asia Minor, and to Lismore in Ireland in 1840. Ten years later, having completed the great conservatory at Chatsworth, which was 300 feet long and which to some extent was the prototype of the Crystal Palace, and having the satisfaction of knowing that his plans for the Great Exhibition of 1851 had been accepted by the organizers, Paxton embarked on the reconstruction of Lismore. The stone to rebuild it was brought all the way from Derbyshire.

Hoping to be allowed an unofficial visit to this fascinating place which, apart from the grounds, is rarely if ever open to the public, we presently found ourselves in a courtyard, one side of which housed the Duke’s agent, another side an austere, high Victorian estate office. Glad that we weren’t wearing our bicycle clips we entered it and found, not as I had imagined an old man called
Mr Fothergill standing at a high desk scratching away at eviction orders with a quill pen and chuckling to himself the while, but a pair of formidable ladies, Irish versions of Bond’s Miss Moneypenny. They looked as if they probably had a computer or two locked away in a roll-top desk.

For a moment I thought we might win through but it was not to be. The agent was elsewhere, and not expected back until the following morning; would we telephone for an appointment another day, one of them said in tones which somehow contrived to mingle concern for our future with complete indifference and to create a feeling of pessimism as to the outcome of any telephone conversation we might succeed in having with him. Both the Duke and his agent are well served by these ladies who, apart from only having two heads and not three, make Cerberus look like a lap dog.

What had we missed? The mediaeval chapel of the Bishops of Lismore, restored as a fantastic ballroom or banqueting room for the sixth Duke, some of its furnishings, such as the great chimneypiece, designed by Augustus Pugin (1812–52), who played an important part in the design of the new Houses of Parliament. These works at Lismore must have been among his last, for the re-modelling did not begin until 1850 and in 1851 he was appointed a Commissioner of Fine Arts for the Great Exhibition. By the end of that year overwork had induced a nervous breakdown of such severity that in 1852 he became a patient in a private asylum, from which he was removed to Bedlam, the great public asylum in South London (now the Imperial War Museum), and subsequently died at Ramsgate that same year. Those who saw the interior after Atkinson’s re-modelling say that it was not particularly exciting. ‘Vast apartments full of battered furniture and gloom’ was what Lady Caroline Lamb hoped to find at Lismore, when brought to Ireland in an attempt to make her forget Byron by her husband and her mother, Lady Bessborough. She was disap
pointed. The rooms proved to be small and, to her taste, bijou.

In 1814, however, workmen had discovered, hidden in the walls, two objects of inestimable value. One was the Lismore Crozier: made of pale bronze ornamented with gilt and lapis-lazuli over an oak core, it bore an inscription asking for prayers for Nial, son of Aeducain, who was Bishop of Lismore from 1090 to 1113, and for Nechtan, the artist who made it. The other find was
The Book of Lismore
, a manuscript on vellum, compiled in the fifteenth
century by various scribes from the long-lost
Book of Monasterboice
, which contains accounts of the lives of the saints together with historical and romantic tracts.
²⁵

The village outside the walls of the castle was a pleasant place with a wide street flanked by shops, some of which had windows dressed with merchandise that looked as if it had been acquired in the 1930s. It was early closing and the place was one of the most deserted of all the villages we had so far seen, at least in broad daylight, or what was currently serving as broad daylight in these parts, which wasn’t much. Even the pub, quite a lively-looking place from the outside, was closed. In every way, in its neatness and well-keptness, Lismore announced itself as something which is still quite common in England wherever Dukes exist but which is almost impossible to credit in Ireland, given the building horrors that have taken place in the last few years: a Ducal appendage.

The village has two ‘cathedrals’: St Carthage’s Cathedral (Church of Ireland) and the Roman Catholic St Carthage’s Church, built in the 1880s (this too is known as ‘the Cathedral’, but the See is really at Waterford). The Protestant cathedral had been destroyed by some warlike ruffian at the beginning of the seventeenth century and rebuilt at the end of it. In 1827 it was given a spire by George Richard Pain, one of two English brothers (the other was James) who originally worked as assistants to John Nash. It is not surprising, given these Nashean antecedents, that it has a somewhat frivolous appearance.

Carthage, otherwise Charthaigh, Cuda or Mochuda, was the son of a shepherd. He became a monk at the age of twelve, and spent forty years as an inhabitant of Rahan Abbey in County
Offaly before being expelled at Easter 635 for abandoning the traditional date of Easter celebrations. Carthage finally reached Lismore, where he was offered a tract of land on the banks of the Blackwater by the Prince of Waterford, on which he founded a monastery which became known as the ‘Holy City’. His order survived there to reach the height of its importance in the eighth century, when it became a place of pilgrimage and retirement for Irish kings and princes who had had enough of the rude, rough world outside, after which it was sacked five or six times by the Vikings, but always rebuilt. Its golden age finally came to an end when Strongbow’s son plundered and burned everything – the church, the abbey, the convent for women and the leper hospital; and it was on this site laid waste that the beastly Prince John built the first castle.

The next surprises in store for us were some constructions in a wooded valley upstream from Lismore on the left bank of the Blackwater, at a place called Ballysaggartmore. We found them by chance on the way to see something else which we never got to. The first buildings we encountered (although abandoned, they are certainly not ruins, and show every sign of having been built to last for ever) were two Gothic gatehouses hidden away at the foot of the demesne near the main road, forming an extraordinary castellated complex of archways, towers and turrets, pierced with windows with leaded panes, and built of blocks of yellow sandstone. The whole thing was the epitome of Gothick melancholy. What could it have cost to build? From the gateway a long drive led away through dense woods to another magnificent set of follies, a castellated bridge pierced by three Gothic arches with gatehouses at either end in the form of miniature castellated castles, each with a two-storey round tower defending it, all executed this time in rusticated red sandstone of local origin. Beyond all this one expected to see a moderately sized castle, or
at least a continuation of the drive; but there was nothing, only a very muddy track leading away among the dripping trees along the side of the hill, and another which led steeply down through the valley to the main road. With the little stream purling along and the rain hissing down on us and the miniature castles that looked as if they would never grow old Ballysaggartmore was a place to remember.

It was not until I got back to England that I was able to find out anything much about it, and that was pretty sketchy. These wonderful constructions were the work of J. Smith – not even his first name seems to have been recorded – who was head gardener to a gentleman named Arthur Keily, on whose property they were built. He married a Miss Martin and it was she who is said to have persuaded him to build a castle in emulation of his brother’s castle, Strancally, at Knockanore, south of Lismore, which was designed and built by the Pain brothers sometime around 1830.

The Ballysaggartmore Gothic gatehouses and castellated bridge were intended to be architectural appetizers on the way to the
pièce de résistance
– the castle itself. Had it been built, they would have ceased to be follies and would simply have formed part of a grander design. Unfortunately, so much money was expended on these
hors d’oeuvres
that there was none left for the castle itself, and the Keilys – he changed his name to Ussher in 1843, as did his brother at Knockanore – were forced to continue to live in their not very grand eighteenth-century house nearby. It is a sad story, but at least the Keilys (or Usshers) could console themselves with the thought that although they didn’t have a castle, they did have the most wonderful follies.

After Ballysaggartmore we drove to Mount Melleray, high on the slopes of the Knockmealdown Mountains, an abbey built by Trappists in what was then a wilderness after all the foreign members of the order were expelled from France in 1822. Here
we hoped to stay the night in the abbey guest house in which the monks offer free hospitality, but unfortunately for us this service was not operating in winter. The abbey church was rather grim and bare; it was built in the 1920s, a largely infelicitous time for architecture, particularly ecclesiastical architecture, and was the sort of building in which it is always Sunday afternoon. Even the conifers that had been planted along the terrace, possibly as a windbreak, were calculated to obscure the magnificent views from it to the south and west, where the sun had finally managed to break through, bathing everything in a stormy, ochreous light. It is strange how impervious so many members of the Church appear to be to the surroundings in which they perform their everyday acts of faith, a Church which in the past has inspired some of the greatest artistic masterpieces the world has known.