Hello everyone and happy Monday from rural Mid Cork!
I had a lovely week, writing away on the third Harp book, and as part of that I went to Cobh to do a bit of research last Sunday. It’s about a thirty five minute drive from my house. While I was walking around there I got a pang of guilt and decided the time had come to come clean to you all! .
The Queenstown Story is set in Cobh for sure, it’s instantly recognisable and most people who visit Ireland go there with good reason, but the inspiration for the Cliff House and the graveyard where Henry is buried are not in fact in Cobh at all, but in another part of East Cork very dear to my heart. The picture above is where I imagined the Devereaux family are laid to rest. I could see Rose and Harp picking their way across the higgledy piggledy headstones to find Henry’s grave.
I mention to you often how walking on the beach is how I untangle the plots I get knotted up in my brain like six sets of old Christmas lights that someone just stuffed in a bag last January. (We’ve all been there) My beach of choice is in Youghal, a medieval town east of Cobh. (Though there is evidence of it being even older, a Viking settlement)
My family love it so much, We have a small beachside property there.
This is the town where the movie Moby Dick was filmed, and it was home to Sir Walter Raleigh too. Edmund Spencer wrote The Faery Queen there. There are abbeys and priories, medieval marketplaces and an old clock tower, castles and almshouses, lots of old churches of various denominations, and a huge stone wall encircling it all dating from 1250 AD. There’s a long beach, that stretches for miles in both directions out of the town and it’s my happy place.
Since we all have had our wings clipped in terms of travel since that wretched Covid reared its ugly bat-like head (Actually bats are kind of cute, one flew into our house recently, noisy little things though.) I thought I would tell you about one of my special places.
There’s a big old house on a cliff that I can see from my place, and its in semi-dereliction. Nobody seems to know the full story with it, but though it’s in a bad way now, you can tell that once it was magnificent. I walk past it on my way to the lighthouse with my two micro-dogs and I try to imagine who lived there and what happened to make people abandon such an amazing house. That’s when the idea of the Cliff House came to be. All over Ireland there are similar houses, but this one really fascinates me.
I feel so lucky to call Ireland home, and it’s funny because I write about the Irish struggle for independence, people sometimes think I’m very political and I’m not really. I appreciate what the men and women of the past did to liberate us, and none of us here will ever forget their sacrifice, but we live in peace now and it serves nobody to keep the resentment or bitterness of the past in our heads or our hearts. I believe the Ireland they fought and died for, is the one we now have and they would want us to enjoy it. It’s not perfect, of course not, no place is, but it is special.
Ireland means so much to me, and not just because all of my people live here, but because this country is in us, every bit as much as we are in it. Sometimes, I need to sit by the pounding Atlantic (always cold) and feel it. The sense of my ancestors, the struggles, the music, the literature, the history, the language. It’s a palpable thing here. And I know that for people who visit us, they feel it too. That sight when you fly over Ireland, Johnnny Cash called it ’40 Shades of Green’, of fields and farms and cities and coastline, answers a call to come home in every person with Irish blood in their veins. Born and reared here, or a tenth generation child of an immigrant it doesn’t matter, when you land here, you feel like you’ve come home.
We have a complex and complicated past as you all know. and it is immortalised in poetry and in song. Here’s one of my favourite poems. (Though Mr Yeats is hands down my favourite poet – this isn’t one of his)
It’s called The Planter’s Daughter by Austin Clarke and a planter was a person who was given land in Ireland by the British in an effort to dilute the indigenous populations. Famous plantations took place on a widespread basis in Ulster and Munster in the seventeenth centuries. The planters would have been seen as separate from the locals and in lots of ways the enemy. But in this poem Clarke describes a girl who wasn’t ‘too proud’ to mix and know her neighbours. She was a beauty. Some of the greatest champions of Irish liberation were English men and women. and so as I say, it’s complicated!
The Planter’s Daughter
The night stirred at sea, and the fire brought a crowd in,
And they say that her beauty was music in mouth.
And few in the candlelight thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her drank deep and were silent
The women were speaking wherever she went
As a bell that is rung, or a wonder told shyly,
and O she was the Sunday in every week.
Here is a link to the wonderful Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem incorporating this poem into the haunting slow air, Ar Éireann ní Neosfainn Cé Hí (For Ireland, I’d not tell her name) The song is in Irish but you can look up the lyrics in translation if you’re interested. You’d be here all day if I wrote it out here for you!
The Planter’s Daughter/Ar Eireann ní neosfainn cé hí (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuptYmkVRUk)
It will be a little while yet, the vaccines need to get figured out, but once we get our lives back, then do yourself a favour, come on home.
Beidh céad míle fáilte anseo duit,
(A hundred thousand welcomes await you)
Le grá agus buiochas,
The hypnotic draw of Cobh.
September 16, 2020