Round Ireland in Low Gear (25 page)

Later that evening we were taken on an extensive tour of the College, including its completely new campus. Then, after having raced one another up the enormously long, tiled corridor of New House on our bikes, we retired to our respective single rooms, both of us feeling that, although there was no one to stop us, there was something slightly wrong about sharing a bed in a seminary. Lying there in the pale, austere but comfortable room, it was difficult for me, a non-Catholic outsider, to imagine what life had been like in this seminary; however, I did have with me a book that had been given me by Loughlin J. Sweeney, a life of Dr Charles William Russell of Maynooth. It was Dr Russell, scholar and churchman, of whom John Henry Newman wrote in the
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
, an exposition of his spiritual life: ‘He had, perhaps, more to do with my conversion [to Catholicism] than anyone else. He called upon me, in passing through Oxford in the summer of 1841, and I think I took him over some of the buildings of the University. He called on me again another summer, on his way from Dublin to London. I do not recollect that he said a word on the subject of religion on either occasion. He sent me
at different times several letters; he was always gentle, mild, unobtrusive, uncontroversial. He left me alone.’

Russell went to Maynooth in 1826, at the age of fourteen; he spent his whole life there, first as a seminarian, later as a professor and President, and died there in 1880. At the time when Russell first went there the students numbered 391 and the average age of entry was seventeen or eighteen. The majority had free places and a grant from the British Government which provided for their annual maintenance, which was estimated at about £25 a year. About 110 had to pay their own fees and the remainder received bursaries from their dioceses. All teaching staff and students were required to swear the oath of allegiance to the Sovereign and repudiate any kind of Papal authority, civil or temporal, within the British realm. Russell wrote home to his mother in his first term that ‘we have a great deal of praying to do here’, and that he had bought a bed and furniture for £5 10s and engaged a washerwoman to do his laundry at 7s 6d a quarter.

At Maynooth, as indeed at almost any other great seminary, the everyday life of the students in many ways resembled that which Islamic students had to put up with in a
medersa
, a college of Koranic theology in a city such as Fez in Morocco. First, the long years of study: the full course lasted seven years (in Fez anything from three to ten years), the first four being the equivalent of a Bachelor of Arts course at a lay university and the last three devoted to theology. As at Fez, a great deal of time seems to have been spent learning accepted texts and studying lecture notes. Second, the long hours: in summer the students’ day began at 5 a.m. (6 a.m. in winter), and continued until 9 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were free. Sunday was a pretty full day of religious exercise, with the celebration of Solemn Mass and Divine Office, the daily service of the Roman breviary, both of which it was obligatory to attend. Even out of term time it was
rare for seminarians, or for that matter the professors, to be allowed home. It very much depended on the attitude adopted by the bishop in whose diocese they resided. Some, such as the Bishop of Down and Connor, preferred them to remain in College during the vacations. One professor recalled that in the course of six years, he was only allowed home on three occasions, and he thought this was about average.

A third similarity was the coarse and monotonous food. Russell recalled Lenten repasts consisting of ‘ling, oil, vinegar, mustard, etc., all jumbled together’. But on St Patrick’s Day 1827 he wrote that for dinner they had ‘fresh fish, which is a most uncommon thing here, two eggs each person, and an apple pie’ followed by wine, three bottles to each table of eight students.

Contrary to what was widely believed in the outside world the majority of seminarians, especially in the early days, came not from peasant communities but from comfortable, sometimes very comfortable backgrounds. Generally speaking they were strongly nationalistic. Some took part in the Rebellion of 1798, and were subsequently for O’Connell and for the Young Irelanders movement, which split with him in 1847 to found the Irish Confederation and helped to inspire the bloodless revolution in Paris the following year. They supported the Fenians in the 1860s and the Easter Rising in 1916, in the course of which the President had the utmost difficulty in preventing the students, who saw the sky bright with flames over Dublin, marching on the city and taking part in the insurrection. At one point he considered sending them all home.

It was at Maynooth, too, that Eamon de Valera, who had been a part-time lecturer in mathematics there, was hidden when he was being hunted by British troops. And it was from Maynooth that the bishops (not the faculty as such) issued their manifesto sanctioning resistance to conscription in April 1918 and in June
1919, a statement which described the British regime as being ‘the rule of the sword, utterly unsuited to a civilized nation, and extremely provocative of disorder and chronic rebellion. The acts of violence which we have to deplore,’ they went on, ‘and they are few, spring from this cause and this cause alone.’

To me, lying in my seminarian bed, it was an awe-inspiring thought that from this strange, architectural hodge-podge of buildings, which somehow managed to be an entity, something like ten thousand seminarists become priests have gone out, some of them to proselytize in the most inhospitable regions on earth – although I’m forced to admit that even martyrdom or the cannibals’ pot must have lost some of their terrors after seven winters passed in an establishment in which for more than a century the only heating was in the lecture room.

The following morning was grey, with a cold wind from the north-east (which from our point of view was better than any sort of wind from the west or south-west), and after a final bike ride down the corridor to the ablutions, a breakfast in the Professors’ Dining Room which would have given many a seminarist second thoughts about emigrating after ordainment if they had been served up with it a century or so ago, and a visit to the Library with the President in order to see the Hibernian Bible Society’s recent lavish bequest, we left this hospitable place and took to the road again. Our last act there was to sign the visitors’ book on the page following that on which the Italian President had written his name, and preceding that on which the King and Queen of Spain were due to sign theirs in the course of the next week or so.

‘Fame at last,’ Wanda said, as she took up the pen.

We eventually rejoined the Grand Canal near Sallins, just east of the Leinster Aqueduct which carries the Canal over the valley of the Liffey, the one that Mr O’Neill, Overlord of the Guinness waters, had told us about, which has seven arches, is 400 feet long
and rises 30 feet above the river. Hereabouts, frozen, we had a pot of tea in a pub and heard on the radio news of yet another attack on the ill-fated Virgin of Ballinspittle. Three miles beyond the Aqueduct at Lock No. 18, the last rising lock going west, we reached the summit level of the Canal, at 279.1 feet, a level it was to maintain for five and a half miles before starting to descend towards the Shannon and the Atlantic, just beyond Robertstown, over the border in County Offaly.

Now the sun came out and for the next two days we rode westwards along the line of the Canal with a warm wind breathing down our necks. Beyond Allenwood, a small village in County Offaly, the enormous concrete cooling towers of a peat-fired electricity generating station loomed above a countryside that now looked a bit like parts of Siberia as seen from the Trans-Siberian Railway. Here the Canal began to cross a part of what was said to be, give or take a few thousand acres (I wondered who added them up), the 240,000-acre expanse of the Bog of Allen, a part of what was Ireland’s 2,830,000 acres of bogland before some of it got reclaimed.

Here in the central plain the bog, which is up to twenty feet thick – mountain bog is shallower – displayed a remarkable range of colours, according to the weather, the time of day and also, apparently, the time of year: whitish brown, reddish brown, purple, burnt sienna and brownish black (in autumn it was said to become a fiery red). Where it had been cut for fuel it looked like slices of very rich Christmas cake, much of it now covered with white bog cotton, waving in the breeze. Through this spongy wilderness, some of it reclaimed as pasture and woodland, some of it covered with heather in which grew silver birches and blazing yellow gorse, the Canal stretched away apparently to infinity, its banks now alive with yellow irises and marsh mallows. The only man-made objects in sight for much of the way were the complex machines
that are now used to cut the peat, the miles of light railway that transport it to the factories that turn it into briquettes and to the power stations, and small white farmhouses, though occasionally we saw a ruined castle or church, a lock keeper’s cottage or a pub, and the little rectangular wooden boats used by the farmers to cross the Canal to the far side. We saw very few people: once we saw some tinkers, camped with their carts and hobbled ponies near an aqueduct, who were cooking something in a big black pot over a fire; and we saw lock keepers and fishermen, their hooks baited, according to what they were after, with red worms, ordinary worms, maggots, bread flake, dead fish, spoons or plugs, sweet corn, sausage or meat, dreaming of record catches of bream, rudd, roach, perch, tench, carp or pike. We saw herons, swans, some coot, swifts towards evening, but surprisingly few other sorts of birds; and a couple of water rats but no toads.

Sometimes the towpath was almost impassable with mud and grass, and cycling along it was like trying to force one’s way through a sea of porridge, or it simply disappeared. This meant making detours along other tracks and lanes in the course of which we sometimes lost the Canal altogether. From time to time there were more of the awful stiles which meant unloading the bikes completely. During those days the outside world receded, as did memories of the internal combustion engine, except when we passed through Tullamore, where we spent the night in a B and B whose owner was very glad to see us as a wedding party had failed to turn up, giving no reason.

In the course of the entire journey from Dublin to the Shannon we only saw two pleasure boats actually on the move. Stretched out on the bank, enjoying the sun, and looking out over this treeless and hedgeless bog, it was difficult to believe that it had once been a huge forest of oaks. In it had been found the skeletons of humans and animals (in some pre-glacial parts of it giant deer had been
unearthed); the arctic willow; dug-out canoes and other artefacts of bone and wood; hoards of gold and silver; oak, now of an ebony colour and often used to make hideous objects for sale to tourists; and huge, pale fir roots which are highly inflammable. In these fastnesses the early Christians took refuge, building themselves retreats in which they produced wonders of Irish religious art, and where they survived by cultivating the fertile meadows known as
cluains
which they reclaimed from the bog. These Fir Cell, Men of the Churches, built seven monasteries around Tullamore alone. Even the Normans failed to make any real impression on the bog country. They conquered it, but they soon found themselves assimilated.

One day we ate a picnic lunch of soda bread and Irish spam in a pub which was also an undertakers, the only other occupant of which was an elderly man dressed in the traditional garb of the Irish countryside: black suit and black cap, as black as the bogs themselves. He had spent most of his life since the age of fourteen cutting peat in the bog by hand, and was only too happy to tell us about it.

Neither of us caught his name, as what emerged was extremely heavily accented; he was also rather impatient – ‘Will you listen to me now, for Pete’s sake!’ he would say if I interjected a query when he got to some, to me, otherwise unintelligible portion of his narrative.

‘What we use is the slane
⁴³
and the slane needs to be made by a smith, not a factory one, and it needs to be good and loight, the spade-tree [the handle], elm or larch. A good slane always has a cow horn for the grip.

‘There are two ways of cutting but here in the deep bog you’re
breastin’, that means cutting horizontally with the wing set well back. But first of all you take off the top foot or so, using an ordinary spade [an ordinary Irish spade has a narrower blade than its English equivalent] and these parings are put between the cuttings so that the man who wheels the turf away in his barrow has a dry footing. Then we leave the turfs spread on the ground for a week or so – this is in April or May, the driest toime. Then we put them up in little poiles in the shape of a roof to catch the wind. Then on through summer we turn them and stack in bigger and bigger poiles, either by the bog road, or against the gable of the house. And we call them, according to soize, turfurts, astles, aamps, ickuls and eeks’ – or that was what it sounded like.

‘Would you mind saying them again so that I can write them down, Mr Er—?’ I said.

‘Will you listen to me now, for Pete’s sake!’ said Mr Er- who when dealing with interrupters and other eejits bore a strong resemblance to Mr O’Neill, now some twenty-five miles away down the Main Line. ‘Oime not yet finished about the turf, not by a good bit. Now what we call underfootin’, cuttin’ in the mountain bogs, that’s a different business altogether. Now what you do is …’

So I never did write them down. And what I did find out from a book over the water in the London Library weeks later may not be right: turfurts were turnfoots; astles, castles; aamps, clamps; ickuls were rickles, and eeks, reeks.

On the way west we passed Daingean, which used to be called Philipstown, of which someone wrote: