52 Deoch an Doras

Posted by on Jun 29, 2015 in Ireland | 7 comments “Deoch an dorais” is a common expression in Irish pubs and homes: it literally means “drink of the door,” but a more idiomatic translation would be “parting glass” or “one for the road.” There’s a popular song about this idea: it’s not simply about downing one more drink while you can but more about marking the resolution that must accompany a departure that is not eagerly anticipated—far from it. As the song “The Parting Glass” says,  But since it falls unto my lot That I should rise and you should not I’ll gently rise and softly call Good night and joy be with you all. I’ve been saying goodbyes for the last few weeks—to people and places—and though I’m no drinker, I’ve often thought that a good swig of something strong would ease the process. True, I’ll be back here soon and often (I don’t deserve your pity as I have three trips to Ireland planned in the next thirteen months), but I won’t be living in Ireland for an extended period in the foreseeable future, and that makes me sad. To end our sabbatical year, Ron and I planned a two week trip hitting favorite spots from past trips and including places we’ve always wanted to see. In spite of all the roads and lanes we’ve gone down in the last year (see map: the orange line shows our last trip, the pink lines show trips we’ve taken this year), as we drove around the country we couldn’t help but compile a new list—all the places we still want to visit, all the things we still want to do, all the towns, beaches, high crosses, pubs and restaurants, museums, lighthouses, monastic sites, lakes, mountains, birthplaces and graves, prisons, Big Houses, guided walks, and many more places and experiences we haven’t been able to fit it, not to mention all those we haven’t yet discovered. When I started this blog last July, I wrote, “Over the coming year, I expect everything I think I know about this country to change—or at least to grow new roots and shoots”—possibly the understatement of the century. I haven’t even begun to take account of how much I’ve learned and, as an outcome of that learning and of being away from home, how much I’ve changed. Much of that transformation has been due to the travel, research, lectures, courses, reading, conversations, etc. that I...
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51 Woodbrook

Posted by on Jun 10, 2015 in Ireland | 25 comments Oddly enough, one of the best books about Ireland—a book praised by Seamus Heaney and Brian Moore among others—is a memoir by a Scotsman who lived in County Roscommon for just ten years during the 1930s. Woodbrook by David Thomas was published in 1974 and was instantly recognized as a masterpiece. Many writers and others talk about its influence on them. Des Kenny of the legendary Kennys Bookshop in Galway included it in his book Kenny’s Choice: 101 Irish Books You Must Read (Curragh Press 2009). Though I’m always on the lookout for interesting memoirs, I picked up Woodbrook by accident on a visit years ago to Strokestown House, a Palladian mansion also in Roscommon that today houses a museum dedicated to the Great Famine. The Woodbrook family, the Kirkwoods, and the Strokestown family knew each other, as families from the great estates or “Big Houses,” as the tradition is called in Ireland, were likely to do. When I eventually got around to reading it one summer, I was immediately entranced, not only by the elegant writing, but also by Thomson’s unusual interweaving of memoir, geography, and local and national history. If you are looking for a book that reads like a dream and evokes the essence of Ireland, you can do no better than to read Woodbrook. Woodbrook was the name of the house and estate of the Kirkwood family, who hired the eighteen-year-old Thomson as a tutor to their children in 1930s. Located amid the lush plains and quiet lakes of Ireland’s Midlands, the house had been built by the Phibbs family in 1780, possibly on the site of an earlier structure, and the Kirkwoods bought it from them in the 1860s, adding wings on either side of the original square house. Both family were English in origin and arrived in Ireland as a result of “plantations”—land grants designed to populate Ireland with families from the British aristocracy regardless of any native Irish claims. In addition to farming their land, the Kirkwoods bred racehorses and one of theirs, a horse named Woodbrook, won the Grand National in 1881, a glory that the family were never quite able to equal again. By the time Thomson turned up at Woodbrook, Charles and Ivy Kirkwood were trying with little success to keep the place going. By the end of Thomson’s tenure with the family, they had to sell Woodbrook and...
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50 The View From Here

Posted by on Jun 1, 2015 in Ireland | 2 comments June In June 2014 Ron and I came to Dublin for a week to find an apartment for our sabbatical year. Traipsing around the city we barely knew at the time, we saw several nice places where we could imagine ourselves setting up house, but when we visited 78 The Dickens at The Gasworks and took in this spectacular view from the living room along with the apartment’s other positive features (extra bedrooms, two bathrooms, lots of windows, and easy access to nearby shops, restaurants, and public transportation), we were hooked. Shortly after we moved in on June 29, I rearranged the furniture somewhat awkwardly so that as I sat at my desk each day, I could look out on the DART tracks; the rooftops, chimneys, steeples, and cranes of Dublin 4; the Dublin Mountains in the distance; and the weather that generally moves towards the apartment from the southwest—the view from here. Over the course of the year, I’ve gazed at this live painting with its subtle but telling changes for hours every day and tried to capture it in photography many times. This is my Dublin.   July We arrived on June 29, and by July 3 had a coffee maker, a daunting load of items from IKEA (some assembly required), a strange assortment of groceries, and the beginnings of a tentatively sketched out work routine. By all accounts, it was one of the most beautiful Julys in recent memory, with many days gloriously sunny and warm–that means in the 60’s–like the day in the photo, the view from here. It’s a good thing our son Nick came to visit us a week after we arrived in Dublin, or we might have spent the whole month organizing the apartment and hunting down essentials like a set of wooden tongs for the toaster (found at Tiger), a big garbage bin for the recycling (Argos), or lots of hangers since there are so few drawers in the apartment (Dunnes Stores). We didn’t really need any of the things that much, but part of the fun of moving to a new place is solving these mundane puzzles and getting to know the city through the medium of your daily life. Conquering complicated new rules no one understood to get a bank account, setting up gas and electricity, getting the Internet and cable going, finding the food and household items we wanted at local...
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49 To the Lighthouse

Posted by on May 24, 2015 in Ireland | 5 comments “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.” For several hundred years Irish revolutionaries have clung to this equation—sometimes attributed to Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798)—as their slogan and as justification for the timing of acts of rebellion. If Wolfe Tone, a leader of Ireland’s Rebellion of 1798, did utter those words, he was referring to the French Revolutionary Wars, the spot of bother on the continent that linked the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars in a struggle among European monarchies that lasted a quarter of a century and then some. The rebellion Tone led and died for was intended to catch Britain—always called “England” in the language of Irish independence—at their weakest and most distracted while their army and navy were engaged in the larger struggle. The goal was an independent Ireland backed, surprisingly, by Catholic and Protestant leaders who were tired of living in a neglected and mistreated colony. Like rebellions before it and several after it, the 1798 effort was a miserable failure. But the slogan lived on, and the thinking behind it played a role in inspiring the Easter Rising of 1916 during a very dark time for Britain in World War I. The Rising also failed, but it ignited a series of events that did lead, eventually, to an independent Ireland. But even an independent Ireland—the Irish Free State formed in 1922—was not yet ready to forgive and forget, and when the rest of the world went to war again in 1939 and after, Ireland remained neutral, wary of siding with their former colonizer even against as threatening an enemy as Nazi Germany. It’s hard to believe that any European country could remain neutral in the circumstances, and the stance is not the noblest moment in Ireland’s history. But centuries of resentment and hatred–the legacy of imperialism–do not recede in a few decades. We now know that during World War II the Irish government did secretly support the Allied cause in several ways, most notably perhaps in the form of a very significant weather report delivered on a very significant date from the Blacksod Lighthouse on the Mullet Peninsula, County Mayo (see photo at top). Since reading about this important historical moment, Ron and I have been wanting to see the place where on June 3, 1944, lighthouse keeper Ted Sweeney issued the weather report that changed the world. I’m always keen to visit lighthouses. After all, I grew up in...
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48 My Medieval Stoner Friends

Posted by on May 18, 2015 in Ireland | 3 comments The last time I visited Jerpoint Abbey in Thomastown near Kilkenny, I found myself saying to Ron as he headed off to climb the tower, “I’m just going to say ‘hi’ to the Ormond Knight.” The “Ormond Knight” has been dead for over 600 years. A primitive carved effigy of him adorns one of the pillars in the cloister at Jerpoint, a Cistercian abbey established in 1180 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540. Ever since I first saw this carving twenty years ago, I’ve been drawn to it. The knight’s puzzled expression, obscured by an oversized helmet, and his ill-proportioned body gained my sympathy and my interest, as did the tiny monkey carved awkwardly in the stone to his right. Thought to be a symbol of the Butler family, dukes of Ormond, the odd little figure was clearly designed by someone who had never seen a monkey before. I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of the Ormond Knight, I visit him as often as I can, and I even have a fake stone copy of him hanging on my office wall at home. I’ve already written about him in this blog (“10 In our arts we find our bliss”), because he is often on my mind. What can I say? He’s a friend. All over Ireland there are women and men—many of them only represented by their heads—along with animals and imaginary creatures whom I visit on a regular basis. I love returning to the abbey, church, or castle where these medieval characters reside knowing I’ll see familiar faces. Greeting them each time is very reassuring, for their expressions never change. Like true friends, they are always what they were the last time I saw them. These stone beings reach across the gulf of centuries with their artistry, their individuality, and their humanity.   If you’ve visited the great cathedrals and churches of Europe—Chartres, Cologne, St. Basil’s, Notre Dame, Salisbury, Florence…the list goes one—Irish cathedrals and churches will seem smaller, less ambitious, even amateurish by comparison. With the exception of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, they are not built on a grand scale, and the surviving stonework is much less elaborate, seemingly primitive in conception and execution. The Golden Age of Irish religious art in the seventh and eighth centuries CE preceded the building of the great churches: the famous illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells and artifacts such...
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