Dublin 22.6.1998: Country Churches, Surly Priests

Kilkiernan’s a lovely place, down a hill on the hillside from the main road. As we left, I noticed cows watching with bovine half-curiosity from a field adjoining the holy place. Larks sang and swooped in the air.

John and Maura talked of some trouble over who controls the site. Apparently it was wild and overgrown until a local farmer, abetted by an American, cleaned it up. The American toiled a whole summer rebuilding walls and installing gates.

Then the ministry of national monuments stepped in to claim ownership, accusing the shrine’s rescuers of meddling. John R. himself got accused of interfering, since he apparently knew this cleanup was taking place. John and Maura said the work’s at a standstill, unless local people do it surreptitiously by night.

A pattern had just been held at the holy well. Maura tells me a pattern need not be a procession in honor of a saint, but can be a graveyard-working for those buried in the cemetery surrounding the well. Bright flowers in bunches were around all the graves.

After Kilkiernan, a lunch of salad at the R.’s, and to Mullinavat. Fearing the priest wouldn’t be at home, though we’d made an appointment, I called to tell him I was coming. “Hello,” he said rather brightly, “is this Kevin?” I explained who I was and said we’d be on our way. The response was a glum yeah.

We got to Mullinavat in good time, and Msgr. M. came to the door—having a wee dram taken, Steve and I thought. He ushered us into the rectory office—an old dining room with a wobbly square table in the center, dark with aged varnish, and a few rickety chairs about it. All was sad—disarray, a feeling of the . . . extrinsicness . . . of the church to people’s lives today. On the walls faded pictures of former pastors, stains running out at angles on the wallpaper behind them.

Msgr. M. presented me with one of those computer printouts that now seem to function as parish books in that part of Ireland, made a discouraging remark about “the sort of people who left Ireland in the Famine” and the paucity of records for them, and left. I flipped to the Ryans, and there they were—my Kate, baptized on the day of birth I have from her tombstone, her brother Patrick, and others I had never heard of—an Ellen, a John, the Val Jr. I'd already found.

I was stunned. Years of searching, and I’d found the end of the road. Why Rothe House told me they had no record of Kate and Patrick—despite money I’d sent for the search—is beyond me. And I had written Msgr. M., enclosing money and asking for a copy of the marriage record, only to be sent a transcript of what I already had, with a brief note saying he was unable to copy the record. No thanks for money enclosed. A copy machine stands in the rectory office.

When I found my Ryans in the printout, the monsignor warmed a bit and yielded to Steve’s insistence that we be allowed to see the original records. Steve further insisted on copying the originals, at which Msgr. M. bristled a bit: I was to promise to black out all other names on the page.

What’s the likelihood of my sharing information about illegitimate ancestors of parish folk in the 1830s and 1840s?

After the records search, a careful perusal of the parish graveyard, with John and Maura’s invaluable assistance. I found only one Ryan grave that seemed promising, a flat tombstone mentioning Glendonnell, a “suburb” of Mullinavat, and going back to the 1740s. I believe the Ryans of this stone are the ancestors of those in Buckstown.

Then to Buckstown, which is across a bridge and west of Mullinavat proper. There we talked to a young Mr. McEvoy, a teacher, who said he knew the Ryans often “stood for” McEvoys in church records, but weren’t related. He told us a Mary Ryan had been the last Ryan in Buckstown, and had given her farm (the family farm) to a Daniel McEvoy who took care of her.

He directed us up the road to his cousin Ann McEvoy G., who lives beside the old Ryan place. He also warned us to be careful that she might be suspicious of Americans coming to claim ancestral land.

Tom (or was it Pat?) McEvoy told us, too, of an elderly lady who’d just had a stroke, who grew up in a little house attached to Mary Ryan’s house, and of a Petey somebody, a man in his 80s who’d surely know of the Ryans, since he lives in Deerpark near Glendonnell, and the Ryans over there were kin of the Buckstown ones.

We trekked up to Ann G.’s, passing the old Mary Ryan place—now all overgrown—in the process. Ann G. was at first non-forthcoming and brusque. I thought I’d interrupted her tea and apologized for it, she saying nothing to the contrary, though I later learned she’d finished.

She told me the same Mary Ryan story, and said she believed the Ryan-McEvoy connection was that the Ryans and McEvoys had been neighbors from time immemorial, the Ryans having lived in three houses on the old Mary Ryan place, the smaller two now gone. (Tom McEvoy had told us the McEvoys came to Buckstown ca. 1820 from Fahin? on the Kilkenny-Tipperary border, and bought their land from a Mr. Walsh [pronounced Welsh in these parts] who was much given to drink.)

Ann G. also told me Mary Ryan was a single child, daughter of a Tom Ryan, and that Daniel McEvoy was her (i.e., Ann’s) uncle. I showed her the McEvoy names I’d copied from the computer version of the parish records, and she brought me inside to the kitchen to see papers she had, with the same information. As we talked, she told me there were no Tobins in Buckstown—never had been, it seemed—and that all the Tobins were from Listrolin-Tullogher way. She also said, significantly, that the Tobins are related to the McEvoys. Perhaps that explains why Ryans and McEvoys are always standing for each other in the parish.

Then to Mary Ryan’s. We climbed a rickety metal fence and went to the house, the bottom floor of which has been used to stable animals. Had to stoop to get through the door, it’s so short.

Inside we found two rooms, one atop the other. Where plaster had peeled from the walls downstairs was stonework that seemed old to Steve and me, though John Ryan believed the house is 20th-century. There were an old fireplace with an iron arm to hold pots and a built-in oven beside it, both now cemented up.

The stairs going up were very precarious, worn thin, and shifting in places. Two windows upstairs overlooking the road, with shutters inside. Sticks of broken furniture here and there, but no other signs of human occupancy for many years.

Outside we detected beneath elder, bramble, and vine an old stone animal pen with a high narrow window, and the remains of old stone walls. I picked a foxglove to press into this journal.

I felt that here, I was on ancestral ground, even if it seems that the Mary Ryan house is not so old. John Ryan said it’s curiously constructed, tall and narrow and unlike other farmhouses in the region.

And goodness! How could I have forgotten the time in the church, after our graveyard search? St. Beacon’s was built in 1802—early for an Irish country church of the penal years. That means that in this very church my ancestors were baptized, married, buried.

I looked again at the altar with its red Corinthian columns running to the ceiling, surmounted by a red and gold triangle depicting what? The Holy Spirit? God’s eye? I can’t recall.

It’s a plain church, a plain country church with white balconies in the—what’s it called, nave? The only statues are one of Mary, one of the Sacred Heart, either side the altar.

I sat for awhile, letting it all sink in and crying. The sadness of their leavetaking, which was so definitive. This church, the one I was seeing with my own eyes, was the same one they’d have seen, one final time, before leaving.

I thought, too, of the years I’d searched for this, of my grandmother and how she’d have loved to see this place. I thought of how this search had led me to Catholicism, and wondered in what sense I’m Catholic now, after all that’s happened. I thought of how the end of a long search, a long journey, is bittersweet: there’s the satisfaction of seeing one’s efforts rewarded, but the emptiness of the quest laid to rest. There’s also that nagging sense that no journey short of death (and even then?) is ever really definitively over. Every new end leads to a new beginning.

Dublin 21.6.1998: Holy Wells and Headache Cures

Now in Dublin. That last day with the R.’s was . . . sensational. Drove after breakfast to the Kilkiernan holy well, not far from Mullinavat. As with all these holy wells, such a peaceful and ancient spot, one with obvious “pagan” resonances.

There are a number of high crosses, along with a phallic stone from the pre-Christian era, and some stones whose name John and Maura called, but which I don’t recall—B. something—that may or may not predate the monks. If the former, it would seem the monks (7th century?) appropriated the “pagan” site, and sought to Christianize it. If the latter, these may simply have been the monks’ corn-grinding stones. They’re now regarded as holy objects, holy water fonts whose water has virtue for this or that.

The well is unassuming, a hole in the ground with a grate over it, black-appearing water (color from the surrounding rock) with moss in it. I dobbled my fingers in it, fearing to drink it. Nearby was an elevated font with a sign that the water was good for headaches.

Piltown, Ireland 18.6.1998: Bare Wood Floors,Tears and Pain

In Ireland now, at John R.’s in Piltown. He’s quite an avid gardener, hence the pots of geraniums I’ve painted and sketched all too crudely. On all sides, the house is surrounded by carefully tended pots of flowers, shrubs, flowerbeds, and fruit and vegetables. It’s idyllic.

As so much of Ireland is, when you drive through it. I especially like the landscape and the small towns as we drove south past Carlow, which is grimy and urban-looking) (and yesterday’s Dublin paper says, increasingly a bedroom community for Dublin).

Stopped in Mullinavat as we drove down. To all appearances a rather poor community in hilly land. As I’ve read, the English landlords were less interested in that land and left it to the Gaelic Irish. And the whole area does have that wild Gaelic highland feel—a bit forlorn, with overgrown roadsides and hills in the distance.

The rain added to the forlorn feeling: heavy, unremitting, driving rain all the way from Dublin—and more forecast today. As I sit on John R.’s small sun porch, the clouds are lowering and clotted.

Steve and I walked through the Mullinavat cemetery, getting thoroughly soaked, even though we had umbrellas. Saw a few Ryan and Tobin graves. Many stones are almost illegible.

We also went into the church, a poor little church with bare wood floors that are unwaxed and worn thin from years of use. Here and there shiny, incongruous linoleum covers them.

Yet I feel spiritually at home in such churches in a way that I don’t in Bavarian ones. Hard to fell silence when the walls and ceiling are at play with gilded garlands and gay colors. Here in Mullinavat, there’s that feel of years and years of concentrated silence. And tears and pain.

Piltown, 24.7.01: Leac an Scail and Scones with Jam

“Erected by Thos. Tobin of Harristown in memory of his Father John Tobin who Dept. this life ye 14^th of Febr. 1804 Aged 70. Also of his Children who died young”—Muckalee Cemetery, Harristown.

A trip today to Harristown to see Mary D., who has lived there all her life and knows its inhabitants. The drive, as our drive to Mullinavat several years ago, was gorgeous. It was a misty day in the morning, giving way to some sunshine by afternoon. The vistas—long sweeping views of hillsides with green fields and barley—were lovely.

We drove up into the Walsh (pronounced Welsh) Mountains and over them to Harristown, which is high, but in a kind of high pastureland looking out onto the higher promontories around. These include Tory Hill, from which one may see four counties.

Harristown itself is a cluster of houses and other buildings at a T road, with the various roads leading to widely separated farms. John commented on the sparseness of population, the distance between the houses, and said it struck him as lonely.

We stopped at a shop to ask directions and were told by the shopkeeper, a Wexford woman who rolled her eyes up to heaven and shut them to count houses in her head, to stop at the fifth house along a certain road. It turned out to be by our count the third house.

Mary D. was a short, stocky blond woman, energetic and friendly, with a thick accent. She used phrases—flusterin’ about (to describe children playing)—and “the heron got a cop on and left.” The latter part of a story about a young heron who visited her place recently, and whom the crows tried to peck to death, until he got a cop on and went into the bogs. John and Maura were surprised and didn’t know the expression, thinking it was American. It’s not Irish, they say.

Mary D. told me of Ryans who once owned the shop at the crossroads—a Willie Ryan now dead, and a Daniel and Mary, none of whom married. Daniel went to America. She gave no dates, but these folks seem to have lived in this century. Their place was sold to a Butler family.

She then took us to two old cemeteries nearby, Muckalee and Killahy. Both were around tiny old churches long gone. John told me that, up to a certain synod in the 1100s (as best I recall), each little civil parish had its own church.

The Muckalee cemetery had recently been sprayed to kill the grass growing in it for a Mass. Its legible stones were huge and deeply carved, though overgrown with lichen. They often went back to the 1700s, with people born in the 1600s. The names were ones I find in my Ryan research—Ready, Murphy, Holden, Kelly, Sheehan—all still found in Harristown except for Sheehan.

The cemetery’s on a hillside in a field, with an ancient holy water font, broken and now recently cemented into a stone base by Mary D.’s son. There’s an ivy-covered gnarled old tree in the cemetery. That, the brown grass, the windswept hillside, and the jumble of stones, give it a rather forlorn look.

The Killahy cemetery is about a mile away, also in a field, but tamer looking, with two old trees, huge ones, a cedar and a chestnut, in its center. The stone walls of the ruined church are also much more discernible.

Though I’d found a Tobin in Muckalee, at Killahy I found almost all Grants, with an Aylward or two sprinkled in.

From the cemeteries, we drove back to Harristown, taking a picture of a brightly painted house in the village proper. Beside it is a ruined building, a dark forbidding gray but an imposing structure, which Mary told us was once an RIC constabulary.

Mary insisted we come in for tea: “You’ll have a cuppa and a scone,” and gave us her recipe—a fistful of flour, sugar, margarine, with two eggs and several fistsful of currants. We ate them with delicious strawberry jam she’d made from 15 pounds of strawberries she’d picked earlier in the summer at Kildalton College in Piltown. I noticed that she used both the pounds measure and the kilo, which she pronounced with a long i—kyelow. In the cemetery, as she read tombstones, she also pronounced “alias” as if it were the biblical name Elias.

After Harristown, a drive back by way of the dolmen, the leac an scail, between Harristown and Piltown. What an impressive sight. It’s on a McCarthy farm, up a little path, where it seems to be waiting there, silent yet speaking deep from the earth. It’s a portal dolmen, appearing from the side like some weird geometric game with huge rocks that seem to rest on others, yet don’t really do so. Only when one walks around to the front does one see the portal.

Then dinner—plaice baked with a tartar sauce inside the crust, fresh peas, boiled potatoes, and rhubarb tart—followed by drinks with the R. friends, Rosemary and Raymond M. Mr. M. seemed very surprised when I asked him if his roots were in Yorkshire. It’s where he was born. He asked how I divined that, and I told him I had ties to a M. family (going back in my Braselton family’s history) that came from Yorkshire. Then bedtime.