Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Map of Ireland
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
The Provinces and Counties of Ireland
CONNACHT
County Galway
County Leitrim
County Mayo
County Roscommon
County Sligo
LEINSTER
Dublin City
County Carlow
County Dublin
County Kildare
County Kilkenny
County Laois
County Longford
County Louth
County Meath
County Offaly
County Westmeath
County Wexford
County Wicklow
MUNSTER
County Clare
County Cork
County Kerry
County Limerick
County Tipperary
County Waterford
ULSTER
Belfast
County Antrim
County Armagh
County Cavan
County Derry
County Donegal
County Down
County Fermanagh
County Monaghan
County Tyrone
Gazetteer
Index of People
Index of Places
Copyright
For Ros
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ISBN: 9780091926748
Bestselling author Christopher Winn takes us on a fascinating journey around Ireland, discovering the traditions, triumphs and disasters, foibles, quirks and customs that make up the Irish people. From their peccadilloes to their passions he uncovers entertaining stories and astonishing facts that will amuse and inform us in equal measure.
Travel from coast to coast across Ireland and learn how every county contributes to the distinct Irish personality in its own unique and different ways. From County Leitrim, the most sparsely populated county in the Republic of Ireland to County Louth, Ireland’s smallest county, discover the site of the first play performed in the Irish language, sail the longest navigable inland waterway in Europe and watch the horse racing at Ireland’s first all-weather racecourse. Listen to the memories and tales of ordinary folk from every walk of life and find out from them what it means to be Irish.
Beguilingly illustrated with pen and ink drawings throughout, this charming book is guaranteed to have you exclaiming: ‘I never knew that!’
Christopher Winn has been freelance writer and trivia collector for over twenty years. He has worked with Terry Wogan and Jonathan Ross, and sets quiz questions for television as well as for the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. He also produces for theatre and has toured with Hugh Massingberd’s play, Ancestral Voices, about James Lees-Milne. He is the author of the bestselling I Never Knew That About England. Books covering Ireland, Scotland, Wales and London came next, followed by I Never Knew That About the English.
THE IRISH ARE fond of their counties. As well as their own distinctive physical make up, each of Ireland’s 32 counties has its own characters and personalities. The different landscapes of each county imbue those born and bred there with different characteristics, pose different challenges, evoke different moods and responses.
The placid lakes of Fermanagh or Westmeath give rise to a different kind of poetry or philosophy to the mountains of Wicklow or Kerry. The wild and lonely lands of Donegal inspire a different kind of music and literature to that which comes from the picturesque meadows of Dublin or Waterford. The quiet lacustrine countryside of Longford brings forth a different type of character from the windswept bastions of Antrim.
Hence any study of the Irish people must be sensitive to the Irish landscape and that landscape is most recognisably and comfortably divided into the counties.
The counties I have grouped into the four ancient Irish provinces or kingdoms of Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster, for these provinces, still much loved, define an older Ireland from which the modern land and its people developed and grew. To understand the Ireland and the Irish of today it is essential to know from where they came.
THE IRISH ARE philosophical and proud, they are poetic and passionate, they are great musicians and writers, inventors and pioneers. They are hospitable, full of fun, and with a wicked and self-deprecating sense of humour that translates into the most wonderful literature and art. Irish singers and entertainers, actors and designers carry a picture of Ireland to the far corners, and while Ireland is still seen by many as predominantly rural, modern Ireland has grown rich and successful in industry with talented entrepreneurs and retailers and designers.
But who are the Irish? George Bernard Shaw, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, described himself thus. ‘I am a genuine typical Irishman of the Danish, Norman, Cromwellian and Scotch invasions.’ He might have added Celtic – the Scoth, or Scotii, were a Celtic Irish tribe who crossed the sea from Ulster to Argyll and then returned. And all over Ireland there are the remnants of Neolithic civilisations that occupied Ireland even before the Celts arrived from Europe.
Hence the Irish character is a fusion of all these different peoples and cultures, forged and shaped over time into an Irish identity and personality that then spread out again from Ireland across the world – the Irish diaspora is vast and vibrant with some 80 million people worldwide claiming Irish descent, 40 million of them in the United States.
The Irish island may be small but the Irish influence is huge and this book tells the story, not just of those who created Ireland, but also of those Irish who helped create new worlds across the oceans, and imbued them with a subtle Irish flavour and a distinctive Irish philosophy.
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND’S LARGEST LAKE O’FLAHERTY’S CASTLE IRELAND’S THIRD LARGEST CITY A POET AND HIS DONKEY AN ANCIENT FISHING VILLAGE FRIENDSHIP RINGS IRELAND’S LONGEST RACING FESTIVAL GALWAY OYSTERS NORA BARNACLE THE CONNEMARA BUS
Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Nicholas, a prominent Galway landmark.
Richard Kirwan Robert O’Hara Burke Dan O’Hara John Ford Margaret Dolan William Joyce John Huston Peter O’Toole Francis Barrett
COOUNTY GALWAY is Ireland’s second largest county and contains the 7,000 acres of Connemara National Park, opened in 1980, as well as IRELAND’S LARGEST GAELTACHT, or Irish-speaking area.
THE COUNTY IS split almost into two by LOUGH CORRIB, which covers an area of 68 square miles (176 sq km) and is THE LARGEST LAKE IN THE REPUBLIC AND SECOND LARGEST IN ALL IRELAND. Lough Corrib empties into Galway Bay by way of the RIVER CORRIB which, at just under 4 miles (6 km) in length is thought to be THE SHORTEST RIVER IN EUROPE. The river, which is popular today with whitewater rafters, flows far too powerfully to be navigable and, in the 12th century, IRELAND’S FIRST CANAL, THE FRIAR’S CUT, was constructed to allow boats to pass between Lough Corrib and the sea.
NEAR THE SOUTH shore of Lough Corrib is AUGHNANURE CASTLE, a six-storey tower house located just outside the village of Oughterard, ‘Gateway to Connemara’. It was built in the 16th century by the O’Flahertys, who controlled much of the land around Lough Corrib from a series of castles, of which Aughnanure was the most powerful. In the main hall one of the flagstones was hinged as a trapdoor so that unwelcome guests could be tipped into a watery dungeon below.
The O’Flahertys were amongst the most feared of the Galway chieftains, so much so that a sign was hung over the west gate of the Norman town of Galway that read, ‘From the ferocious O’Flahertys may God protect us.’ In 1545 Donal O’Flaherty married the celebrated pirate queen Grace O’Malley, and today the O’Flahertys are still an influential presence in County Galway, having contributed an impressive number of mayors to the city.
GALWAY CITY, IRELAND’S third largest city, lies on the banks of the River Corrib where it flows into Galway Bay. The town was once renowned for its fleet of distinctive boats called Galway Hookers (from the Dutch word holker, meaning a small, manoeuvrable vessel), designed to cope with the heavy seas of Galway Bay and used for fishing and trading with Holland and Spain. Galway Hookers are no longer in service, but examples still turn up to annual sailing events and races.
Galway boasts two fine churches, THE COLLEGIATE CHURCH OF ST NICHOLAS (CHURCH OF IRELAND), THE LARGEST MEDIEVAL PARISH CHURCH IN IRELAND, and the imposing Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Nicholas.
In keeping with the Irish-speaking tradition of the region, Galway is home to An Taibhdhearc, a theatre founded in 1928 that puts on plays exclusively in Irish. In 1935 a statue of Padraic O Conaire, one of Galway’s most cherished Irish writers, was unveiled by Eamon de Valera in Eyre Square, which is now a memorial garden to the American president John F. Kennedy, who visited the city shortly before his assassination in 1963. O Conaire’s statue has since been moved to the Galway City Museum, beside the Spanish Arch.
PADRAIC O CONAIRE was born in Galway and grew to love the Irish language when he was at school in Rosmuc, a village in the heart of the Connemara Gaeltacht. After spending some time in London working as a civil servant he returned to Galway to teach and write Irish as part of the Gaelic Revival of the early 20th century. He was one of the first to use Gaelic for journalism and he also helped run events for the Gaelic League, an organisation dedicated to the preservation of the language. He would travel around Galway and Connemara with his donkey and cart, stopping at pubs and villages to tell stories, and perhaps his most popular work is his short story about how he came to meet his little black donkey, and the fun and games they had together.
WHEN THE TOWN of Galway was founded in the 12th century as an Anglo-Norman stronghold, it was put down alongside one of Ireland’s oldest fishing villages, CLADDAGH, which dates from the 5th century and took its name from the Irish word ‘cladach’, meaning stony shore. The native Gaelic community of Claddagh and the Anglo-Norman merchants of the town pretty much kept themselves apart, and from medieval times right into the 20th century, Claddagh was governed by its own mayor or ‘king’, and kept to its own laws and customs. The village became renowned as a classic example of an authentic Irish community, attracting numerous writers and artists, before its pretty jumble of thatched cottages was demolished in the 1930s and replaced with modern housing, and the village was subsumed into the city of Galway.
COME DOWN FROM the days of old Claddagh is the traditional Claddagh friendship or wedding ring, fashioned as two hands clasping a heart, surmounted by a crown. Legend tells that the ring was originally designed by a Galway man, Richard Joyce, who was captured by an Algerian corsair while sailing to the West Indies in the 17th century and sold into the service of a goldsmith in Algiers. Joyce became so adept as a goldsmith himself, that when William III came to the throne and demanded that the Moors release all their British prisoners, his goldsmith master offered half his own fortune and his daughter’s hand in marriage if Joyce would stay on as a partner. The Galway man was already betrothed to a Galway lass, however, and he returned to Claddagh and gave his love the ring he had designed and made especially for her during his long exile. Today, Claddagh rings have become a cultural symbol worn by those of Irish descent all over the world.
THEY HAVE BEEN racing horses in County Galway since the 13th century, but the first racing festival held at BALLYBRIT, home of the present GALWAY RACES, was in August 1869, when over 40,000 people attended the two-day event. Today, the summer festival is held in the last week of July and lasts for seven days, THE ONLY WEEK-LONG RACING FESTIVAL IN IRELAND OR BRITAIN. The main race, the Galway Plate, is run on the Wednesday, while Thursday is Ladies Day and includes a ‘best-dressed lady’ competition.
Galway Races form the premier festival in the Irish racing calendar, and are as much a social event as a festival of horse racing, with champagne and oyster bars, jazz bands, trade stands and competitions. The original grandstand, built in the 1950s and replaced in 1999, boasted THE LONGEST BAR IN THE WORLD (now thought to be found in Düsseldorf).
FOUNDED IN 1954 by Brian Collins, manager of the Great Southern Hotel, as a means of extending the tourist season, the GALWAY OYSTER FESTIVAL has become one of the world’s premier oyster festivals. It is held in Claddagh over four days and nights in September, the first month of the oyster season, and attracts visitors from all over the world to sample the oysters, along with plenty of Guinness, vintage car displays, street entertainments, music and the Oyster Pearl beauty contest. The main highlight is the hotly contested World Oyster Opening Championship. Film director John Huston is said to have consumed over 3,000 oysters when he attended the festival in 1960.
NORA BARNACLE WAS born in Connemara, the daughter of a baker. She had just turned 13 when her mother threw Nora’s father out for drinking too much, and mother and daughter went to live in Nora’s uncle’s house on Bowling Green in Galway City, now a museum in her memory. Almost immediately Nora met her first love, a 16-year-old schoolteacher called Michael Feeney, who tragically died that year of pneumonia.
Three years later, another of Nora’s sweethearts, Michael Bodkin, also died of pneumonia, having stood outside Nora’s window in the heavy rain, serenading her.
In 1903, after her uncle learned of an affair she was conducting with a local Protestant boy, Nora was sent away to Dublin, and it was while working as a chambermaid at Finn’s Hotel that she met her future husband, the writer James Joyce. Their first romantic encounter took place on 16 June 1904, and Joyce later chose this date as the setting for his masterpiece, the novel Ulysses, about an ordinary day in Dublin seen mainly through the eyes of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertisement canvasser.
THE CONNEMARA BUS, driven by Hugh Ryan, is a 1949 Bedford bus that takes tourists for a four-hour drive around Connemara from Galway City, and IS THE OLDEST OPERATING BUS IN IRELAND.
Bloomsday
Since 1954, June 16th, or ‘BLOOMSDAY’, has been observed as a holiday in Ireland, during which Joyce’s life is celebrated with readings, dramatisations and street parties. While the biggest celebrations are in Dublin, where aficionados retrace Bloom’s footsteps around the city, Bloomsday is also celebrated in various places around the world that share a connection to Joyce or the novel, such as Philadelphia in the USA, where the original handwritten manuscript of Ulysses is kept at the Rosenbach Museum, or Hungary’s oldest town, Szombathely, birthplace of Bloom’s father Virag, a Jewish émigré.
The original Connemara Bus, a wooden vehicle built on to the chassis of a 1932 Bedford truck, was driven by Hugh Ryan’s grandfather and used to ferry the women of Connemara and their produce to market in Galway.
Connemara is famous for its green marble, and is IRELAND’S ONLY SOURCE OF TRUE MARBLE.
GALWAY FOLK
RICHARD KIRWAN, scientist and eccentric, was born in CLOUGHBALLYMORE, near Kinvara. In 1787 he published his most famous work, ‘Essay on Phlogiston’, which held that phlogiston was the substance given off by combustion – a theory that was later disproved when it was discovered that combustion involved burning oxygen from the atmosphere. He was also a colourful figure in the fields of chemistry, geology and meteorology and is credited with introducing the study of mineralogy to Ireland in his ‘Elements of Mineralogy’ – the first essay on the subject in English. In 1799 he became President of the Royal Irish Academy.
Cregg Castle – home of Richard Kirwan
Richard Kirwan’s family were one of the 14 ‘Tribes of Galway’, powerful merchant families made wealthy from trade with the Continent, who dominated Galway politics from the 12th century until the late 18th century. Unlike most of the tribes, who were of Anglo-Norman origin, the Kirwans had Irish roots.
In 1754 Richard Kirwan inherited CREGG CASTLE, near the village of Corandulla north of Galway City, when his older brother was killed in a duel. Cregg Castle was built by the Kirwans in 1648 on the site of a 13th-century castle and was one of the last fortified houses to be constructed in Ireland. Richard put up a laboratory in the grounds, the remains of which can still be seen. Cregg Castle is now a hotel.
ROBERT O’HARA BURKE (1821–61) THE FIRST MAN TO CROSS AUSTRALIA FROM SOUTH TO NORTH, was born near Craughwell. Burke became an army officer and then a policeman, and emigrated to Australia in 1853. He was chosen to lead an expedition, which became known as the Burke and Wills expedition (along with English surveyor William Wills), whose aim was to travel from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria, on Australia’s northern coast. They succeeded in reaching the Gulf, but both Burke and Wills died on the return journey at a place called Cooper’s Creek, from where their bodies were eventually recovered and laid to rest in Melbourne.
Sure it’s poor I am today,
For God gave and took away,
And left without a home poor Dan O’Hara
With these matches in my hand,
In the frost and snow I stand
So it’s here I am today your broken hearted …
Dan O’Hara’s Song
DAN O’HARA was a tenant farmer who lived with his wife and seven children in a small stone cottage in the shadow of the Twelve Bens in Connemara. Theirs was a simple but happy life, typical of rural 19th-century Ireland, full of storytelling and singing round the turf fire of an evening. Unfortunately, most of Dan’s land was given over to potatoes, and in 1845, at the start of the Great Famine, the crop failed, leaving Dan with no income and unable to pay the rent. He and his family were evicted and had no choice but to emigrate to America. Dan’s wife, and three of their children, died on the voyage, and the survivors arrived in New York destitute. The children were taken into care and Dan was reduced to selling matches on the streets. His story has been made famous in song.
Film director JOHN FORD (1894–1973) was born John Martin Feeney (sometimes Sean Aloysius O’Feeny) in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to Irish parents from County Galway. Remembered especially for his classic western Stagecoach (1939) which began his cinematic partnership with John Wayne, Ford is THE ONLY DIRECTOR EVER TO HAVE WON FOUR BEST DIRECTOR OSCARS, for The Informer in 1935, The Grapes of Wrath in 1940, How Green Was My Valley in 1941 and The Quiet Man, which was filmed entirely in Ireland, in 1952. He had a five-year affair with Katharine Hepburn who, with four wins, has won more Best Actress Oscars than anyone. In later life Ford was famous for wearing a trademark black eye-patch.
MARGARET DOLAN (1893–2004), THE OLDEST WOMAN IN IRELAND when she died aged 111, was born in TUAM.
Buried in Bohermore Cemetery in Galway City is WILLIAM JOYCE (1906–46), founder of the National Socialist League and broadcaster of Nazi propaganda in the Second World War. Joyce had an Irish father and, although born in New York, he grew up in Galway. Fanatically anti-Jewish and anti-Communist, Joyce was unwilling to fight against Hitler and at the start of the war he fled to Germany, where he got work as an English language broadcaster. Accused by the Daily Express of using ‘English of the haw-haw, “dammit-get-out-of-my-way” variety’, Joyce became known as Lord Haw-Haw. He was executed for high treason at Wandsworth prison in London in 1946, and his remains were reinterred at Bohermore in 1976.
The American-born actor and film director JOHN HUSTON (The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen) was of Scots-Irish descent. In the 1950s he became an Irish citizen and bought and restored a Georgian house called St Clerans in Craughwell, a small village about 10 miles (16 km) east of Galway. His daughter, the actress Anjelica Huston, went to school for a while at Kylemore Abbey in Connemara. In 1948 Huston won two Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (for Best Director and Best Screenplay), and in 1985, at the age of 79, he became THE OLDEST PERSON EVER TO BE NOMINATED FOR THE BEST DIRECTOR OSCAR, for Prizzi’s Honor. Huston was also an artist and in 1982 was asked to design that year’s label for Château Mouton Rothschild. Huston owned St Clerans from 1954 to 1971.
Kylemore Abbey
Film actor PETER O’TOOLE is thought to have been born in Connemara in 1932, although he also has a birth certificate from a hospital in Leeds, Yorkshire. He is best known for his role as T.E. Lawrence in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia and is also THE MOST NOMINATED ACTOR NEVER TO ACTUALLY WIN AN OSCAR – with a grand total of eight nominations. In 2003 he accepted an Academy Honorary Award for his lifetime contribution to film. In honour of his Irish ancestry he always wears one item of green clothing, usually a sock.
FRANCIS BARRETT was born in 1977 into a family of Galway Travellers, and at age 19 he was chosen to represent Ireland at boxing in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, becoming the FIRST TRAVELLER TO REPRESENT IRELAND IN ANY SPORT AT OLYMPIC LEVEL and THE FIRST TRAVELLER TO CARRY THE NATIONAL FLAG AT THE OPENING CEREMONY.
CRUISING CAPITAL OF THE SHANNON FATHER OF INDUSTRIAL GERMANY HARPISTS AND PRESIDENTS A BENEVOLENT DESPOT A FINE MODERN WRITER
Carrick-on-Shannon, ‘the cruising capital of the Shannon’.
Bishop Patrick O’Healy Robert Strawbridge Revd Joseph Digges
COUNTY LEITRIM is the most sparsely populated county in the Republic of Ireland. Much of the county is covered in water and it is often remarked that land in Co. Leitrim is sold not by the acre but by the gallon.
The county town, CARRICK-ON-SHANNON, is described as ‘the cruising capital of the Shannon’. It is a popular base for boats using the Shannon Erne Waterway, which links Ireland’s two greatest rivers and forms part of THE LONGEST NAVIGABLE INLAND WATERWAY IN EUROPE, stretching for 250 miles (400 km) from Lough Erne in Co. Fermanagh to the mouth of the River Shannon at Limerick.
The Shannon Erne Waterway, opened in 1994, is actually the restored Ballinamore and Ballyconnell Navigation, which was constructed in 1860 as part of the Ulster Canal, meant to link Limerick with Belfast. The Navigation was designed and executed by the Dublin-born engineer WILLIAM THOMAS MULVANY (1806–85), who also established numerous other building and irrigation projects to help as job creation schemes during the Great Famine.
On a trip to London, Mulvany met Michael Corr, an Irish businessman born in Slane in Co. Meath, and brought up in Brussels where his family had fled after the uprising led by Robert Emmet in 1803. After establishing that Mulvany was an experienced surveyor, Corr asked him to have a look at some coal deposits he owned in the Ruhr valley in Germany, near the village of Gelsenkirchen.
At that time Germany had very little mining expertise and imported most of its coal from England, but Mulvany recognised that there was considerable potential here for development. And so, with backing from some wealthy Irish investors, and using the experience he had gained draining rivers and bog-land in the west of Ireland, Mulvany set to work exploiting the rich coal seams of the Ruhr valley. He brought over skilled English miners from Durham, who settled in Düsseldorf, and in 1856, on St Patrick’s Day, he opened the Ruhr’s first deep coal-mine, which he named HIBERNIA.
Two more mines followed in quick succession, SHAMROCK and ERIN, and at the same time Mulvany built up the area’s industrial infrastructure with a transport network of railways and canals, thus creating the beginnings of Germany’s mighty Ruhr valley industrial complex. Mulvany, the ‘FATHER OF INDUSTRIAL GERMANY’, is commemorated in Düsseldorf with his own street, Mulvanystrasse.
An interesting side note to the development of coal-mining in the Ruhr valley region was the discovery in 1856 of the well-preserved skeleton of a primitive man, the first recognised human fossil. The remote and little-known valley west of Düsseldorf where he was found is called NEANDERTAL, or ‘Neander valley’, and this name has since become the generally accepted term for an ancient or prehistoric man.
MOHILL is a pleasant small town set on a gentle slope in peaceful lacustrine country in the south of Co. Leitrim. TURLOUGH O’CAROLAN (1670–1738), Ireland’s National Composer, and the last of the traditional Irish harpist composers, married Mary Maguire in Mohill and they had their home in the town for many years. In 1986 a bronze statue of the harpist was unveiled by President Patrick Hillery in the town centre.
One of the main cross streets in Mohill is called Hyde Street in memory of Ireland’s first president, DOUGLAS HYDE, who spent much of his childhood on this street, where his father and grandfather lived. A keen champion of the Gaelic Revival, Hyde wrote the first play performed in the Irish language, Casadh an tSugain, or The Twisting of the Rope, presented in 1901.
Just to the south of Mohill is LOUGH RYNN CASTLE, built in 1832 for the Earl of Leitrim, and the most famous ‘big house’ in the county. During the Great Famine of 1845–9, the landlord, WILLIAM SYDNEY CLEMENTS, LORD LEITRIM (1806–78), gained a reputation for running the estate with ‘benevolent paternalism’. However, after he became the 3rd Earl on the death of his father in 1854, he apparently turned into a ruthless despot, evicting both Protestant and Catholic tenants without mercy and, according to Shane Leslie in his play Lord Mulroy’s Ghost, despoiling the virgin daughters of his tenants.
Whether Lord Leitrim deserved such calumny is open to debate. In 1860 he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while walking down the main street in Mohill when a local man, James Murphy, took a shot at him with a blunderbuss for refusing a duel to ‘take satisfaction for your ruffianly conduct towards my wife’. It turned out that Murphy took exception to anyone who even talked to his wife, but the attack, and further similar incidents, for which the perpetrators were not punished very heavily, convinced the Earl that he was being persecuted and this no doubt contributed to his isolation and strange behaviour. He was finally the victim of a successful assassination in Milford, Co. Donegal in 1878 by three men, one of whom was said to be the father of a girl badly treated by the Earl.
Lough Rynn Castle is now a hotel. The hotel library was dedicated to the writer JOHN MCGAHERN (1934–2006), not long after his death. McGahern had lived for the last 30 years of his life in the village of Fenagh, near Mohill, where he worked a small farm and wrote his most celebrated novel Amongst Women, which tells the story of an embittered ex-IRA man and his family, and is set largely in Co. Leitrim. Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who performed the dedication ceremony, called John McGahern ‘one of Ireland’s finest modern writers’.
John McGahern
LEITRIM FOLK
THE FIRST IRISH BISHOP TO DIE FOR HIS FAITH, BISHOP PATRICK O’HEALY (1545–79) was born in DROMAHAIR. He became a Franciscan as a boy and studied in Spain at the new University of Alcala, near Madrid. In 1576 he travelled to Rome and was made Bishop of Mayo. On his return to Mayo, O’Healy was arrested on suspicion of colluding with the Pope and King Philip of Spain to invade Ireland, and was eventually executed at Kilmallock in Co. Limerick for failing to swear the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Elizabeth I as Head of the Church.
THE FIRST METHODIST PREACHER IN AMERICA, ROBERT STRAWBRIDGE (1734–81), was born in DRUMSNA into the only Protestant family at that time in the south of Co. Leitrim. Converted to Methodism by John Wesley, he preached widely throughout Ireland until he received the call to ‘go to the New World and take the Gospel to the frontier’. In 1760, at the age of 26, he sailed to America and settled at Sam’s Creek, in Maryland, where he rented a two-storey log house which he opened for Bible study and preaching. Here he held the first Methodist classes in America and baptised the first American Methodists. In 1764 he built the Log Meeting House nearby, where the first Methodist Society of America was formed and which became known as the Mother Church of American Methodism. The Meeting House was demolished in 1844, but Robert Strawbridge’s own house still stands and is now an American Landmark.
The ‘Father of Irish Beekeeping’, the REVD JOSEPH DIGGES (1858–1933), lived for most of his life in MOHILL. In 1883 he came to Mohill as curate, and two years later became private chaplain to the Clement family (Earls of Leitrim) of Lough Rynn Castle, which is when he took up beekeeping. For over 30 years between 1901 and his death in 1933 he edited The Irish Bee Journal, later The Beekeeper’s Gazette. He was a conscientious editor and only ever failed to produce four issues including, much to his chagrin, the May 1916 issue, which was blown up en route to the printers during the Easter Rising. In 1904 he published The Irish Bee Guide, or The Practical Bee Guide, a Manual of Modern Beekeeping, which became, and has remained, Ireland’s standard work on beekeeping. Although he is buried in Dublin, there is a stained-glass memorial window to him in his church at Clooncahir, just outside Mohill.
A SAXON ABBEY ONLY MOSQUE OUTSIDE DUBLIN IRELAND’S LARGEST NATIONAL PARK CASTLEBAR RACES MUSEUM OF COUNTRY LIFE THE ABBEY THAT WOULDN’T DIE CROSS OF CONG BROWNE COUNTRY
Ballintubber Abbey, ‘the abbey that wouldn’t die’
Ulick Bourke Michael Davitt Margaret Burke Sheridan Charles Haughey Mary Robinson
The name Mayo – Mhaigh Eo, or ‘plain of the yew trees’ – first appears with MAYO ABBEY, the remains of which can be found in flat lands some 12 miles (19 km) south of Castlebar. Founded in 668 by St Colman of Lindisfarne, Mayo Abbey is THE ONLY ABBEY IN IRELAND ESTABLISHED FOR SAXON MONKS, and it became a great centre of learning. Among the Saxon scholars who studied there, it is said, was Alfred the Great, one of whose sons is buried here.
Opened in 1998, BALLYCROY NATIONAL PARK in the north-west of County Mayo is Ireland’s sixth and newest national park. Covering nearly 46 square miles (119 sq km), it is also IRELAND’S LARGEST NATIONAL PARK, and one of the largest areas of blanket bog left in Europe.
THE FIRST-EVER HURLING MATCHES took place on the great plains of Moytura.
IRELAND’S FIRST PURPOSE-BUILT MOSQUE, and the only mosque outside Dublin, was opened in Ballyhaunis in 1987. It is also THE MOST WESTERLY MOSQUE IN EUROPE.
Mayo’s county town was founded in 1613 by John Bingham, ancestor of the Earls of Lucan, on the site of the 12th-century castle of the de Barrys, hence Castlebar, or ‘castle of the Barrys’.
During the rebellion of 1798, on 27 August, a combined force of French troops and Irish rebels under the command of the French General Humbert attacked the British garrison at Castlebar and inflicted a crushing defeat. The British soldiers fled in such a panic that the battle became known as the ‘Castlebar Races’.
After his victory General Humbert set up a provisional government in Castlebar and declared a Republic of Connacht, as a prelude to a Republic of Ireland. A member of a local landowning family, John Moore, was appointed as its president. The Republic, however, was never formally recognised by France and suffered a fatal blow when Humbert’s French troops surrendered to the British at the Battle of Ballinamuck on 8 September.
On 21 October 1879, the Irish National Land League was founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar. The League was formed to help tenant farmers gain ownership of the land on which they worked and, in pursuance of this goal, instigated various peaceful forms of civil unrest during what became known as the Land War. The most effective type of protest the League employed was the ‘boycott’, named after a particularly intransigent land agent called Captain Charles Boycott, whereby tenants, tradespeople and the local community would refuse to deal with or engage with an unpopular landlord.
The most infamous member of the Bingham family who founded Castlebar was RICHARD BINGHAM, 7TH EARL OF LUCAN, born in the town in 1934. In November 1974 he disappeared after his children’s nanny Sandra Rivett was found murdered in the basement of his estranged wife’s home in Lower Belgrave Street in London. The alarm was raised when Lady Lucan ran into a nearby pub, the Plumber’s Arms, covered in blood, shouting ‘Murder! Murder!’ She later claimed that Lord Lucan had killed Rivett by mistake, thinking it was her, his wife.
Later that night Lord Lucan turned up at the house of his friend Susan Maxwell-Scott at Uckfield, in Sussex, where he made several phone calls and then left. She was the last person known to have set eyes on him. Three days later the police found his Ford Corsair abandoned near the docks at Newhaven, covered with bloodstains, and in the boot a piece of lead-piping similar to one found at the crime scene. Lord Lucan has never been seen since, although there have been numerous ‘sightings’ over the years, the most recent being in Australia in 2000.
In 1999 Lord Lucan was ruled officially dead, but his son George is still not able to claim the title because no body has been found to provide ‘definite proof’ that the 7th Earl is deceased.
Set in the grounds of TURLOUGH PARK HOUSE, a massive Victorian pile just east of Castlebar, is the Museum of Country Life, where various displays illustrate aspects of Irish rural life from between 1850 and 1950. It is the first branch of the National Museum of Ireland to be located outside of Dublin.
Turlough Park House
BALLINTUBBER ABBEY, 7 miles (11 km) south of Castlebar, sits on the Tochar Phadraig, the ancient pilgrim path taken by St Patrick on his way to Croagh Patrick, the Holy Mountain. The abbey was founded in 1216 by Cathal O’Conor, King of Connacht, and has become known as ‘The Abbey that Wouldn’t Die’. Although suppressed by Henry VIII and left roofless by Oliver Cromwell, Ballintubber Abbey can boast THE LONGEST UNBROKEN ATTENDANCE RECORD IN IRELAND, with mass being celebrated here every day for nearly 800 years.
LOUISBURGH, a smart, breezy little town of four Georgian streets on the southern shores of Clew Bay, was founded in 1795 by John Browne, the 3rd Lord Altamont. In 1758 Browne’s nephew had taken part in the capture of Louisburgh in Nova Scotia, and Co. Mayo’s Louisburgh was named in honour of this feat.
Cathal O’Conor was the last High King of Ireland before the Anglo-Norman invasion. His father, Turlough O’Conor, ordered the making of Mayo’s greatest medieval treasure, the ornate CROSS OF CONG, behind which the monks of the monastery at Cong used to process. Made of oak and covered in gilt bronze, the cross stands 30 inches (76 cm) high and is said to contain a fragment of the True Cross – there is an inscription which reads: ‘In this cross is preserved the cross on which suffered the Founder of the World,’ and another ‘Pray for Turlough O’Conor, King of Ireland.’ The Cross of Cong is now in the National Museum in Dublin.
CLEW BAY, which is studded with 365 islands, one for each day of the year, was the domain of the pirate queen GRACE O’MALLEY (1530–1603), ancestor of Lord Altamont – the present Lord Altamont, Jeremy Browne, is her only remaining direct descendant. Grace O’Malley’s life is remembered in the Grainne ni Mhaille Centre in Church Street, Louisburgh.
Not far from Louisburgh, at Bunlahinch near Roonagh Lough, is IRELAND’S OLDEST BRIDGE, a rare ‘clapper’ bridge thought to date from the 12th century. Made from 30 big limestone slabs that rest on rough stone piers about 3 ft (1 m) above the water, it is 50 ft (15 m) long and has 37 arches, MORE ARCHES THAN ANY OTHER BRIDGE IN IRELAND.
WESTPORT HOUSE, which sits above the River Carrowbeg near where it runs into Clew Bay, is the ancestral home of the BROWNE FAMILY, THE FIRST ENGLISH FAMILY TO SETTLE IN THE WEST OF IRELAND and the last direct descendants of the pirate queen Grace O’Malley. The Brownes arrived in County Mayo in 1580 when landowner John Browne, the first person to accurately map Connacht, settled in the tiny village of The Neale, near Kilmaine. His great-grandson, Colonel John Browne, married Maud Bourke, daughter of Theobald Bourke, 3rd Viscount Mayo, who was Grace O’Malley’s grandson.
Browne acquired many of the estates of his in-laws, including the ruined castle of Cathair-na-Mart, the ‘stone fort of the bees’, which had been destroyed in 1588. Using the foundations of the castle, the dungeons of which can still be seen inside the house today, Browne began to build a fortified house on the site in about 1685, but construction stopped when Browne, as a Catholic, took the side of James II against William of Orange and almost lost the estate, despite being involved in drafting the Treaty of Limerick in 1691.
John Browne’s son Peter managed to hold on to Cathair-na-Mart and changed the name to Westport. Then his son John, who was educated at Oxford and became a Protestant, commissioned the German architect Richard Cassels, who was living in Ireland, to design a classical house incorporating the core of the original begun by his grandfather. John, who became the 1st Earl of Altamont in 1771, also started to lay out the new town of Westport, to replace the old village, which he considered to be too close to the house.
John’s grandson, the 3rd Earl of Altamont, brought in the English architect James Wyatt to complete the house, and the sumptuous dining-room at Westport House is considered to be amongst James Wyatt’s finest work. Wyatt was also asked to oversee the design the new town of Westport.
In 1800 John Browne, the 3rd Earl of Altamont, was created Marquess of Sligo, and the family have continued to live at Westport House ever since, the present owner being the 10th Marquess.
In 1960 the house was opened to the public for the first time, and the grounds now include a small zoo and teashop.
The town of Westport, laid out to the designs of James Wyatt at the end of the 18th century, is one of Ireland’s few planned towns and is considered to be County Mayo’s most elegant show town. Particularly picturesque are the tree-lined Mall, which runs along the River Carrowbeg, and Bridge Street, where colourful pubs and shops jostle for attention. One such establishment, which specialises in musical evenings is Matt Molloy’s, owned by The Chieftains’ flautist, MATT MOLLOY.
Irish Republican JOHN MACBRIDE (1865–1916) was born in Westport. In 1903 he married the revolutionary Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, the object of poet W.B. Yeats’s long unrequited love, and they had a child Sean MacBride, who would go on to be chairman of Amnesty International and win a Nobel Peace Prize in 1974. John MacBride was executed for his part in the Easter Rising in 1916.
MAYO FOLK
ULICK BOURKE (1829–87) founder of the Gaelic Union, was born in Linnenhall Street in CASTLEBAR, where there is a plaque marking his birthplace. The Gaelic Union was the forerunner of the Gaelic League founded by Douglas Hyde in 1893, and was dedicated to promoting the use of the Irish language.
MICHAEL DAVITT was born in the village of STRAIDE, situated between Foxford and Castlebar. His parents were evicted for rent arrears during the Great Famine, and the family decided to take their chances in England rather than suffer the workhouse. At the age of 11, Davitt lost an arm while operating a spinning wheel in a Lancashire cotton mill.
As a young man Davitt became interested in Irish history and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood to agitate for Irish independence. He was the leading figure behind the founding of the Irish Land League in Castlebar in 1879. The success of the League’s campaign of peaceful protest, as devised by Davitt, is said to have inspired Mahatma Gandhi to employ similar methods in his own struggle against the British Empire.
In 1887 Davitt, by now a prominent political figure, performed the opening ceremony of the Michael Davitt swing bridge linking the mainland to Ireland’s biggest island, Achill Island. This bridge was replaced in 1947 by a new Michael Davitt Bridge, which itself was widened in 2007.
Michael Davitt is buried near the ruined friary in his home town of Straide.
IRELAND’S FIRST PRIMA DONNA, MARGARET BURKE SHERIDAN, was born in CASTLEBAR. Orphaned at four years old, Margaret was raised in a Dublin orphanage, where her talent was soon recognised by the nuns, and she was sent to London for voice training. The radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi got to hear about her while he was staying in the west of Ireland, working on his transatlantic radio station in Galway, and he arranged for her to perform at La Scala in Milan. There ‘La Sheridan’, as she became known, enjoyed a tempestuous professional relationship with Toscanini, who described her as the ‘Empress from Ireland’ – in contrast to the name she used for herself, which was ‘Maggie from Mayo’. She became particularly known for performing the works of Puccini, by whom she was coached personally.
Fiery and spirited, she exhibited all the expected characteristics of a true prima donna, but underneath she was shy and vulnerable. She retired suddenly in 1935 and returned to Dublin, where she lived quietly for the rest of her life. Surprisingly, she never sang professionally in Ireland, her home country.
The paternal grandparents of former US First Lady PAT NIXON (1912–93) emigrated to America from County Mayo. Pat was born Thelma Catherine Ryan on the eve of St Patrick’s Day, so her father called her his ‘St Patrick’s babe in the morn’ – and the name ‘Pat’ stuck. Her husband Richard Milhous Nixon also had Irish roots, his ancestors hailing from County Antrim.
CHARLES HAUGHEY (1925–2006), fourth leader of Fianna Fail and sixth Taoiseach, was born in CASTLEBAR.
MARY ROBINSON, THE FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND, was born in BALLINA in 1944.