History with a Twist

The beach at Marblehill. Painting by George Russell, known as Æ.

On a bright April morning after swimming at Portnablagh, a neighbor told me that in the evening someone was leading a history walk of our neighborhood. 

 

That is how I learned: 

• there's a skeleton under the floor of our neighborhood castle
  
• what the Irish called early Christians 
• the location of a eucalyptus from Tasmania and cypress from the Ice Age
  
• godfather of Mary Poppins vacationed here...
  
• ...and left an eye witness drawing of a Sidhe in a forest cottage

You can see the castle from the highway and naturally I’ve always been curious about it.

It’s called Faugher House, or O'Boyle's Castle, and was built in the very early days of the Plantation. This was the time when English and Scottish farmers colonized Donegal—at the same time English and Scottish farmers colonized Virginia.

It’s called a castle because of that battlement you can see to the left of the house, the wall with gun slits. The owners had already abandoned it by the early 1700s for a grander and less fortified house the next peninsula over, built “when defence was not a primary consideration.”

 

That’s a photo of the tour guide, Charlie Gallagher. 

He grew up on the farm next door to us. Charlie told us that as a boy he and his friends would play in Faugher castle, and discovered a tunnel out the back. Like many underground passages in Ireland, the legend said that it emerged miles away. Charlie said he never got too far, so I assume he never emerged bewildered from a mountainside in Sligo.

Charlie also told us that a while ago, the farmer who owns the ruin wanted to reuse the flagstones inside Faugher house. (The phrase Charlie used was: “he was lifting flags.”) But they found a long skeleton under the first one they pried up, and left the stones and skeleton alone. 

Behind Charlie you can see a rounded hill. Its name is Mullaghadoney, which Charlie translated as “Round Hill of the Sunday People.” Charlie said this was what the locals named the  Christians they met 1500 years ago. 

Charlie then directed us to turn around and observe our mountain, Muckish.

As the same mountain appears in paintings by George Russell, known as Æ, we know he was standing right here when he painted it. (The first thing you learn about Æ is that he wanted us to call him by a symbol that he said represented “the æon.”)

I will mock George Russell for his pretensions, but I like everything I learn about him. He is usually remembered for his work as a cultural leader and friend of Yeats, but he was active in building Irish institutions after independence including cooperative creameries and banks, the first hydroelectric power plant, and an international airport. 

I love his paintings. Many of them are similar to this one in the National Gallery:

Or this one, “Lordly Ones Appearing to a Turf Cutter:”

There's a wonderful interview with Æ published in 1908 that's worth reading for its earnest details.

Q.--Can you describe the shining beings?

A.--'It is very difficult to give any intelligible description of them. The first time I saw them with great vividness I was lying on a hill-side alone in the west of Ireland, in County Sligo: I had been listening to music in the air, and to what seemed to be the sound of bells, and was trying to understand these aerial clashings in which wind seemed to break upon wind in an ever-changing musical silvery sound. Then the space before me grew luminous, and I began to see one beautiful being after another.'
 

Q.--Can you describe one of the opalescent beings?

A.--'The first of these I saw I remember very clearly, and the manner of its appearance: there was at first a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant, electrical fire, to which the heart seemed the centre. Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared flaming wing-like auras. From the being itself light seemed to stream outwards in every direction; and the effect left on me after the vision was one of extraordinary lightness, joyousness, or ecstasy."

(full text in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans-Wentz 1911.)

My favorites paintings are Donegal landscapes.

I crossed that same creek this morning, the beach covered in tiny clamshells, just like 100 years ago. If those women looked up, they'd see Muckish just like I did today. 

Æ was a great patron of female artists, including Ella Young (who I have written about) and Pamela Travers, who you know as P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins. If you’ve read her books, you know that supernatural creatures you’ve met are much like the Lordly Ones in Æ’s pictures.

Later in the walk encountered another connection to AE. 

After paying our respects to Muckish, I realized we were passing the site of a mystery I've wondered about since I moved here two years ago. I asked Charlie if he knew about the “Lacknalore” stone which is marked on the ordnance map behind our house.

He said when he was a kid, they called it “The Druids Altar.” It was quite large, and “had cup marks on it and everything.” But about twenty-five years ago “the farmer” took a jack hammer to it and “threw the pieces up against the wall.” A neolithic artifact, significant enough that the ordnance officer recorded it on the map in Gothic letters, but the property owner didn’t like it, and that was that.

The townland where I live is "Faugher Lower," but area closer to the beach is known as Marble Hill. Charlie said there must have been an Irish name for it, but when the survey was completed in the early 1800s, the ordnance officer only recorded the English name, and the Irish name is lost. But I wonder if it wasn't Lacknalore.

The Big House of the neighborhood is called Marble Hill house, but these folks weren’t the landlords. (See that tree branch? You’ll see it again.)

Charlie told us the house was built in the 1830s and for a long time was owned by the Church of Ireland, used as the Glebe House for the rector of Ballymore church at the top of our valley. (A "glebe" are the lands set aside to give an income to clergy.) 

 

Official histories, like this one in the National Building survey say that the Church of Ireland sold Marble Hill in 1894 to Hugh Alexander Law, a young attorney from Dublin, and he and his wife lived there until the 30s. But what Charlie told us is that Charlotte (Lota) Law grew up in the house, a daughter of the rector.

Hugh Law served in the British Parliament, and after Ireland’s independence, was elected to the same job in the new country. A friend of mine characterized Mrs. Law as someone who was very interested in the local people and not so much with embroidery like her peers.

Marble Hill's old coach house was where neighbors gathered for céilí dances. 

These sphinxes are still painted with "Law blue" a color that appeared everywhere on the family's gates, fences, and other demarcation of their properties. They are a decoration George Russell would have loved.

Charlie pointed out a Tasmanian eucalyptus, because like all the late Victorians, the Laws loved to collect exotic trees. Irish parks are full of them to this day; in the next town over are two of the biggest Monterey Cypresses I’ve ever seen. 

 

You can sort of see the Tasmanian immigrant there above the beeches and oaks, twice as high as the house. 

Charlie pointed out another kind of cypress over near the beach: an otherwise extinct deciduous cypress grown from a seed recovered from under the tundra in Siberia, brought back by the Late Victorians as the rarest of rarities. All other cypresses in Europe are evergreen.

Here it is against a summer sky.

 

Here's the view toward the house. 

 Compare with this one, taken in late winter a few years ago. 
 

 

We left Marble Hill house, and Charlie led us up behind to a place I have been told about: “the fairy cottage.” Lota Law built it as a playhouse for children, but her friend Æ liked to live there. Later I found these photographs of the interior posted online by the Law family. 

In a later photograph those dancing maidens are replaced by a Lordly One. 

What you won’t see is a photo of the fairy house today because it is too heartbreaking. I know where the cottage is now, but it’s just three broken walls and a pile of stones. A nieghbor who moved here in the 70s told me it was still intact then, but sometime in the 80s some guys found it and destroyed it. And that was that. 

The tour group continued down to the beach, but I was ready to go home, elated and brimming with skeletons and souterrains, altars and ice ages, benevolent landlords and resident fairies.

You know how when you love a place or a person, every detail deepens your love? And then at the same time, you know someday you’ll lose it all, and your love grows deeper?

I was nearly home when my boot slipped on a stone. I rolled my ankle, fell, and broke my arm. I couldn’t swim or type for more than a month. Now I’m repaired and more in love with this place than ever. I feel really lucky. 

 

I remember being told that life is like being launched in youth, rising fast, with lots of commotion, vibration, and clouds that obscure your perspective. In your mid-30s you reach your orbiting altitude, and you glide around, obsessed and in love with internal experiments and observations of the universe. If you're lucky, you stay up there so long you sort of forget how you got there. But eventually, critical internal systems need repair, fuel levels diminish, you experience a sudden drop in cabin pressure, and a collapsed strut. Then there is a catastrophic failure, and the destination grows larger in the window. If you're really, really lucky, you don't crash, but burn up like a shooting star, and people make a wish on you. 

In the Woods Above Marble Hill